Turn Your Side Hustle Into Your Full-Time Dream Job

Want to make your side hustle your full-time gig? Stop looking for shortcuts.

We sit down with Phill Agnew—creator of the #1 marketing podcast in the UK and host of Nudge—to talk about the intentional, and very human path to turning his passion into purpose.

Forget quick wins and optimization tricks—this conversation is for anyone craving real, sustainable growth. Phill shares his own journey from marketing strategist to top podcaster and dives deep into the mindset shift required to go from "just a side thing" to a thriving career.

We talk about:

• Why hacks are overrated (and what actually works)
• What most people get wrong about passion projects
• The hidden costs of turning your joy into your job
• How to decide if your side hustle should become your full-time work
• The surprising freedom that comes with going all in

As always, host Nicole Gottselig reflects, challenges our preconceived norms, and connects the dots.

If you're feeling the itch to go full-time with your hustle—or if you're wondering if you even should—this episode might be the permission slip, pep talk, and reality check you didn’t know you needed.

🎧 Hit play and join us as we unpack the real work behind purpose.

***
Know someone who's flipped the table on their career to follow their life's purpose? Let us know at titan-one.co.

Chapters

• 13:07 The Scientific Effort Behind Phill's Growth Plan
• 17:54 The Blueprint to Your Career Strategy

Transcript

Phill Agnew: 0:01

This is perhaps a hot take in the world of quick wins and hacks. We're told as marketers, as business professionals on LinkedIn every single day that there is one small thing you can do which will dramatically change your career. We have fed this idea that success is just an optimization away. And I believe the opposite. I believe that the more time, the more effort, the more engagement you put into something, the more value you get out of it.

Nicole Gottselig: 0:33

Hello and welcome to Connect With Purpose, where we uncover the journeys of remarkable people who have turned their passions into a Purpose Driven Life. I'm your host, Nicole Gottselig — and whether you're on your own quest for meaning or simply curious how others have navigated their paths, this show is here to inspire and guide you along the way. What does it take to turn a side hustle into a full time career? If there's something that you are doing outside of your day job that you absolutely love, are you just waiting for someone to discover you or for you to just take a chance? Are you more just going with the flow, or do you have some kind of a strategy or plan in place? Well, if you're looking for some tips and some ways to actually take your side hustle or your passion project and turn it into your full time career. I am sitting down today with Phill Agnew. Phill is the host of the nudge podcast, which is the number one marketing podcast in the UK, which is really a huge accomplishment, because Phill started this podcast as his side hustle. Actually, I first met Phill a few years ago when I was being onboarded at a company called Hotjar, and I remember seeing one of his videos, and I remember thinking, Gosh, this, this person has a really great radio voice. He should really work in radio. Little did I know he actually had a podcast on the side. Phil went on to another company called Buffer, and I sort of been watching him from the sidelines, and was fan from the side watching nudge actually really take off. And it was earlier in 2024 that I saw an announcement he made on LinkedIn, and he said, Hey, I'm actually going full in on Nudge, and it's time. So I have been waiting to sit down with Phill for this conversation for quite a while now, and this really is dedicated to anybody out there who has a side hustle, has a passion project and really wants to turn that into their full time gig. I am so thrilled to have you here today, because I'll never forget when I first was introduced to you, I was doing an onboarding at Hotjar, and one of the video trainings we had to do was by you. And I remember saying to somebody, I said, Who is this guy? And I think he needs to be in radio. And everybody said, Well, he is in radio. He has his own podcast. And I was like, he's got the best radio voice I've ever heard. And then now here we are, three years later, running, hosting, founding the UK's number one marketing podcast. So first of all, congratulations, thank you. And I remember reading on LinkedIn last year, you were like, Okay, thank you buffer for a great tenure. I am now going into nudge full time. Full on. This is my full time job for now. So what is Nudge in a nutshell? What is the podcast all about?

Phill Agnew: 3:23

Well, thank you for that lovely intro. Nicole. Nudge is essentially my attempt to try and understand how to make better marketing. That's really what it is. When I first got into my marketing job, almost well over a decade ago, now, I had just spent 50,000 pounds on a university degree in marketing. So I thought I would be really good at marketing, because I just spent a bunch of money to study it and four years learning about it. But I went into this first job in marketing. I was a community manager at Brighton based tech startup, and I was being asked to do things like write blog posts, email, subject lines, case studies, website, copy, CTAs that are highly converting, and I had no idea how to do it, because what I'd learned about at university, which was useful, things like the 4p SWOT analysis, how to deeply understand a company's P and L, that's all really useful at a strategic level, but it wasn't helping me tactically in my day to day. So I really struggled in the first few years of my marketing career to achieve what I was being asked to achieve, and eventually I stumbled across the world of consumer psychology and behavioral science. This is essentially the science behind how people make decisions. I read books like nudge by Richard fallow, which inspired the name of my podcast, but then also Thinking Fast and Slow, the choice factory by Richard shot an alchemy by Rory Sutherland. And these books revealed to me that there is a bit of a science behind marketing. There is a science behind how people make decisions. And when you are writing an email, subject line, a blog head or a case study website, copy, a CTA, if you apply this science, you can change people's decisions in a way that's measurable and reliable. There are principles, there are laws you can follow that I wasn't taught about in university, but I since learned, and when I started applying those laws to my work, I found that my marketing got a lot better. So that all happened a decade ago, and then around five years ago, I thought, well, I love this stuff. I would love for there to be a podcast about it. And did that classic thing of looked for a podcast, couldn't find one, and then cockley thought, well, I'll just create one myself. Then why not? And then that's where the the idea for nudge came from. Wow.

Nicole Gottselig: 5:28

It's inspiring for all of us that are at home, outside of work hours and doing this, because you just for the genuine love of it. So you shared how where the idea came from. You shared the love of it. You saw that nobody else was doing it. You actually did the research for that as well. So how did you actually just keep it going? Because I know you were working in tech at the time. You're working at Hotjar, and then onto buffer. Like, how did you, how did you juggle all of this while working?

Phill Agnew: 5:55

Yeah, if people are in their career and they're going down different paths and trying different things in their career. The story of this podcast is very much that. So in 2018 me and two colleagues at the company I was at in brand watch, were always there was a lot of entrepreneurs at Brown watch. This was the Brighton tech company I was speaking about. And we were always trying to come up with side hustles, things to create second things to work on outside of work hours, to try and build our own thing. Was always inspired by that. And I'm sure many of the listeners of this podcast feel the same way. And me and these two colleagues were working on this idea to create a digital MBA, so a much cheaper alternative to the traditional MBA path that still teaches all of the things you would traditionally get in an MBA. You don't just have to pay the Harvard price tag sort of thing. It was a great idea until we realized that none of us had taken an MBA, and none of us were anywhere near qualified enough to create content like that. So the idea sort of ended pretty quickly. But as part of that idea, we thought we would create a podcast to promote the digital MBA, and I just started, sort of snowballed on that idea and reached out to a few people in the behavioral science space, some of the people I mentioned earlier, to record with them with no real idea about what would end up happening with these these recordings, and two things I learned there. One is that actually scheduling a recording with a guest is surprisingly easy. At least it was back in 2018 people tend to be very kind and very willing to help out a startup person who's trying to start their own thing. So it was very easy to get these recordings done. What I did learn, though, is, once you have the recordings, it is very hard to decide what you're going to do with them and craft the narrative and actually learn the audio side of it. So in 2018 I had these recordings, but I didn't have anything to do with them because we weren't going to create this digital MBA. And then in 2019 me and my partner decided that we wanted to take a sabbatical. We wanted to see a bit more of the world, so we took eight months out and lived in New Zealand for three months and traveled around South America. And it was during these three months in New Zealand I was actually working part time at a Middle Eastern restaurant which had basically no customers. So I had a lot of time to think. The only customer we had and he came in twice was Bob effect from the newer or the like 2000 Star Wars. He's kiwi, and he came in twice. He didn't tip once. Can you believe that? Anyway, so I was pretty a lot of time to think. And I had these recordings, and I kept on thinking, well, I want to do something with them. I really want to go want to create something from them. And I listened back to them a few times, and then thought, I can really create some narratives from these, some stories. And decided to edit them down, record my own script, do lots of research. I was really keen on creating something very high quality. And I think I created eight episodes out of the five or six recordings I had, and then published them every two weeks. And then I came back to my job, because my sabbatical ended, and eight of them had gone out. Pretty much nobody except my mum, had listened. But I really enjoyed creating it, and I really fell in love with the process, and I thought I want to keep this going. And basically continued to do the podcast from there, even though it wasn't getting any listeners, and always treated it as as a side hustle. Always did one every two weeks, which made it just about manageable alongside a full time job. And five years later we're here, or six years even.

Nicole Gottselig: 9:10

Oh, this brings me to patience and timing. And, you know, there's that, remember last summer, I think there was that clip going around on Instagram and Tiktok by Rick Rubin saying, and it was, I think it was really viral about you know, artists, creators, I'm going to refer to you as a creator. I don't know. Are you comfortable with that? Well, I would say your Creator should never be creating for the audience. Of course, you have an audience that you're working towards, and of course you were speaking to us, but from what you just told me, you were creating it for yourself. First genuine interest, you saw that there was this gap, even though only your mother was listening, you still believed in it and believed in yourself enough to keep it going, right? And you didn't give up on yourself, and you kept going and going and going and going, and that's why I wanted to have you on the show, because all of a sudden, then the doors open, and then you went into full time. Right? So had you given up before, then maybe you wouldn't have got to where you are today. So that's what I'm really curious. How did you just keep sticking with it? Did you ever want to quit?

Phill Agnew: 10:09

No, because I enjoyed the process. And I'm a big believer in the more effort you put into something, the more value you get out of it. This is perhaps a hot take in the world of quick wins and hacks. We're told as marketers, as business professionals, on LinkedIn every single day that there is one small thing you can do which will dramatically change your career. Just add this line to your CV and you'll get a load of interviews. Just use this one AI prompt and you can write content for weeks. We have fed this idea that success is just an optimization away. This is sort of, I think, the result of programmatic advertising dramatically influencing the marketing world, totally different conversation. But anyway, and I believe the opposite. I believe that the more time, the more effort, the more engagement you put into something, the more value you get out of it. So that was always my idea with nudge. Is sure, I would just release one episode every two weeks, which isn't very much, but I would read the book of every guest that I interviewed. I would not only do that, I would look at the supplementary research that they perhaps talked about in their book, and read that. I would record my own script afterwards. I would heavily edit it so it became a really nice narrative based discussion, and a one hour conversation would become a 20 minute episode which was full of all of the best bits the guests said, and none of them the gubbins that fills most podcast episodes. And I really liked putting effort into it. And so that answers your first point of I really always believed that effort did equal quality. And even though nobody was listening, I felt like I was creating something good, because I know I put a lot of effort into it, and then I managed to just basically keep doing it, because I was doing one every two weeks, and that's just about enough frequency, which allows you to find an hour after work on some days and then work an afternoon on one Sunday, and you eventually get there, you eventually are able to produce it. Podcast is quite low intensity for most of the activities. In terms of you're not creating video or writing can be quite difficult as well if you're publicly publishing writing. So it was easier in that regard, and just kept doing it. And it slowly did start to grow with bigger guests coming on. It's a very long game podcast, but over the years, it slowly grew. And one of the big, I guess, benefits the podcast has is we is it signed a major advertiser about three years ago now, HubSpot, who still advertise on the show and have greatly helped the show grow. And that came about, I think not because HubSpot saw that the show was growing and that there was a good audience. I think it came about because HubSpot listened to the show and they realized this guy takes this stuff seriously, like this isn't a show that's just created in his bedroom with a couple of recordings over a few hours. It's clear that each episode is worked on heavily, and that gave them the confidence that I would be a good creator to invest in, and I think that really helped me. So to go back to that initial point I made, I think effort really is important. And I think we're told that quick wins are the solution, whereas I really do believe that the opposite is true in a world of quick wins, effort will help you stand out.

Nicole Gottselig: 13:08

So before we go further, let's pause and unpack something crucial. Phill didn't just stumble into success. He deliberately crafted his podcast with an almost scientific approach to quality recording interviews reading entire books by his guests, meticulously editing each episode. Because here's the thing, and maybe the key for the success of nudge, he wasn't doing this for viral moments or quick social media hits. He was crafting something deeper for others in similar positions and passion projects. How do you turn a side hustle from something you do on the weekends into something that actually matters? Phill's about to reveal how intentionality and genuine effort can transform a passion project into something extraordinary. This is more than just another how to start a podcast story. This is about building something meaningful one careful step at a time. You make it look easy, Phill, but I know it's not easy. So what would you say to somebody who's like freaked out about going all in and has this great idea, loves doing it, but it's not really paying anything? Yeah. Well,

Phill Agnew: 14:13

I think the decision to go all in is is a very tricky one, and my to fast forward the story from from HubSpot and investing in the podcast. I moved to buffer after that happened. So I moved from hotja, which we spoke about earlier, to a company called Buffer, who's also a SaaS remote company. They were very supportive of side projects, and they ran a four day week work week, which gave me a full day to spend on the podcast. So I really shaped my career around trying to find career options that would support my side hustle as well. I went for Buffer partly because of the podcast and being able to spend a full day's work every week on the podcast meant I could increase the quantity of shows from one episode every fortnight to one episode every week. And so that really helped. Shocked. So I think my history, at least, I am quite risk averse. I'm not a very risk taking person, and I do get very scared about, yeah, I get really frightened about jumping all into something. And I'm not the type of person who would probably just go for it with the podcast. I had spent maybe the final three years of my career in companies, basically preparing for a world where it could potentially be full time. That was increasing the episode quantity to one per week, getting an app advertiser on board, starting to work on it one day a week. So actually reducing my work hours to make space for that. And then by the time I did go full time, I had a pretty secure revenue stream coming from the podcast, and a fairly good idea that it would work. That said you can never know. It's really easy to sort of sit here and say, Oh, just wait until you're certain that you'll have money coming in from the show. And that's that is bad advice, because you'll never know that for certain, and there is always an element of risk. But I'm the type of person who does believe that if something will work when you're full time on it, it should probably be working a little bit when you're part time on it, when it's a side hustle. That's sensible just to see how it is performing before you go full time and not put all of your eggs in one basket. So to say, at least, that's been my my history.

Nicole Gottselig: 16:18

It's funny how we read people on social media. I'm just thinking, like, yeah, Phill. Just, like, went all in and just said, like, screw the system. I'm doing my own thing, right? Like, I thought this was just the coolest thing ever, but you had, you know, all your ducks lined up. I know you weren't really just like, gonna be, Oh, screw it. I'm just gonna, like, start this podcast and figure it out from there. So there wasn't really one moment where you're like, yes, now I can do it. It was more gradual, yeah, yeah.

Phill Agnew: 16:43

It was difficult, because I think I was in the best job I've ever had, as well. I had an incredible job at Buffer in terms of, I've always really admired that company. I think the four day work week and the way they approach transparency and the way they work is is fantastic. It's an exciting place to be a product marketer, which was my role, because they have an email list of over a million people. So I would hit send on a product launch email, and I would get messages from old schoolmates who I haven't spoken to in 10 years, saying, Why is your face on the buffer email? So it was a really exciting place to work, and I think that was good for me. That's good

Nicole Gottselig: 17:18

with a million people on a mix. Yeah.

Phill Agnew: 17:22

I mean, any marketers listening to that would think, Wow, what a great place to be able to work, because you can promote to so many people. And I think that, in a way, helped it was when I was still so desperate to take the podcast full time, because I have been desperate since the moment I started it. And I think everybody who has a side hustle goes to bed dreaming that one day they could do that as their full time thing. And that's always been the case. But when I think, when I was at Buffer, and I realized I'm still so desperate to take this full time and to see where it goes, that was when I realized I should try it.

Nicole Gottselig: 17:54

You know, Phill just shared how he was working at Buffer, this incredible tech company with a 1 million person email list, he could literally hit send and reach old schoolmates. But then he started talking about something that really caught my attention, the hidden math of career ceilings and floors that most of us never consider. So what happens when you start mapping out the actual potential of your current job versus the unlimited horizon of your passion project? This is where career strategy gets fascinating, and Phill's about to give us a blueprint, and it's so interesting,

Phill Agnew: 18:28

there are some easy calculations we can do to figure out that this is probably a smart thing to do. For example, let's think about ceiling. So this is something I thought about a lot. The ceiling of my potential at a company like Buffer is quite late. I can get a promotion, I can get a pay rise, I can get more responsibility. Maybe I could move into management. But in reality, as an individual, in my career, I'm going from, maybe I'm going one step up the ladder, so to speak. There is a real scene, and then there's a there is a genuine ceiling, like the company was quite small. I'm not going to become more senior than the CEO, for example, and then there is a natural ceiling on how big or how impressive or how successful I can be at that company. There's also a really good floor with a company, so it's hard to go down. You can obviously be fired. That can always happen, so the trap door can open. But in general, it's very hard for things to go wrong, or it's not very hard. That's the wrong way to say it, but it's more unlikely than if you go full time on your own thing, which let's now look at that scenario. So if you go full time on your own thing, the floor is the drop is incredible, like, if you can't sign up an advertiser one week, then you have no money coming in as a podcaster. And that's an incredible flaw. You just have one small failure, and maybe you lose your revenue, you wouldn't have that company. But the ceiling at the same time is dramatically high. So the potential for where you could go is, is huge. You know, there are examples of people who go full time on their own thing, who end up with book deals, speaking deals become in the Zeitgeist and and basically have job security for life. But. If you become well known as a marketer or as a business, personal, or whatever field you're in, you're instantly hireable to everybody within the field anyway. So the ceiling is dramatically higher. I think that's the risk, and that's the payoff you should be thinking about, is not necessarily, will I be getting more money right now in my full time job versus my side hustle, which I want to take full time. One of the things you should be considering is, do I foresee a ceiling or a career path which is dramatically better and more prosperous if I went on full time on my side hustle versus staying at my current company? And that was what really excited me, was this idea of a sort of unlimited ceiling that I could go into now, I'm not sure how much of that will pay off, and has paid off, but then at the same time, there's that same point of, if you don't try, you never know, and there's just no way I could have been running this podcast for six years and never had given it a day full time. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself. So that's another probably reason as to why I wanted to do it. But yeah, a couple of reasons there as to why I think how you can sort of justify the decision when

Nicole Gottselig: 21:02

you actually are aligned in your purpose and what you're supposed to be doing, or what it is that gives you joy, whatever it is that gives you joy where you lose time, where you could do it forever, where you just don't want to give up on it. Eventually a door will open and something will happen. I really do believe that. I really do believe, and it's not too woowoo or anything, because for me, in my life, this is actually, it's proven. It actually does happen. So when you tell me about your trajectory and how you did it, in my brain goes, Yeah, of course, he did it. He put in the time, he put in the effort. It was his joy, was this. But then when it comes to me and maybe to our listeners as well, they're thinking, Okay, well, Phill did it, but I can't do it. Phill's an exception. You know, I can't do it, right? But that's actually, that's a negative thought. It actually doesn't have any grounding, right? And one thing I do notice is that you don't advertise a lot. You're not on like Instagram or tick tock, or you're not showing off a lot, right? So how do you get people like so hooked on you, because you're not, you're not as traditional as, like the big influencers are mine and stuff right now, like I feel like you do it subtly and softly. So how do people usually find you?

Phill Agnew: 22:10

Yeah, that's an example of how I have managed my business to make it right for me, rather than fitting the sort of classic industry template, which was, you have to be on Instagram, you have to be on Twitter, you have to be on Tiktok. I did publish on Tiktok a little bit, and I did go viral once, actually, I had a million views. It was while I was in Indonesia, Nicole and I recorded these videos. And it was sort of hand phone, facing my face. I'd walk around and talk about the latest episode. And one of the ones I talked about with Chris Voss, it went viral, had a million views. And I thought, wow, okay, Phill's hit the big time. Million views. Here we go. I'm gonna be best selling New York Times author by the end of the year. And I'm British, as most people listening can probably tell, and British people famously don't have the best skin for sun tanning, and my nose was a little bit rouge, a little bit red after being in the Indonesian Sun a little bit too much the previous day. And so I got these million views. I'd recorded my video with this slightly red note. Nothing bad, nothing ridiculous. Recorded this video, went onto tick tock. Thought, okay, what are people saying? What are they saying about my amazing insights? Number One comment, why should I listen to this red nose wanker. Second comment, and this is like, 1000s of likes. Second comment, why should I take advice from Rudolph? I was like, God, here we go. And anyway, the long story about that is, there was the comments are kind of funny, and they didn't really, there was nothing really to them. If anything, those comments are fantastic because they tell the algorithm that people are engaged. And it really does work. But despite all of that, the actual number of people who went and listened to the podcast who became newsletter subscribers was very small. And I think I learned a lesson there, which is that you can spend so much time trying to game the algorithm, so much effort trying to tweak it, the rewards won't even necessarily be as high as you hope. So I'm quite anti algorithm. In my own life, I feel like if I'm put near an Instagram algorithm, a Tiktok algorithm, a Twitter algorithm, it will just hoover up my time and rock my brain. So I'm mainly not on those platforms, because I feel like me as a creator, I would just struggle with them. I do spend time on LinkedIn because LinkedIn algorithm is so bad that I can't get hooked into it, although it's getting better, annoyingly. And then I do publish content on YouTube, which I think is a great still a great platform for discovery. So that's two of the ways that I sort of get my name out there and reach more people. But otherwise I just rely essentially on the old fashioned stuff of create fantastic content, build a newsletter list, encourage people to share it, post it on platforms which will amplify your content to the right people, which I think YouTube is more so than perhaps Tiktok, and come on podcasts like this and get your name out there that way. I think we'll go back right to the thing I said at the start of the episode, which is that there is millions of people who will tell you that there are quick wins and that there are ways that you. Can supercharge your growth if you just post 10 times a week on Instagram. I think that can be true for some people, in the same way that anything can be true for some people, that's survivorship bias. I think for the majority of us, the numbers just don't add up. Instagram cannot have everybody who posts 10 times a week becoming an influencer. The only way people can become influencers is if they create content that is genuinely remarkable. And if you want to create content that is genuinely remarkable, you have to put the effort into the content, not into your amplification of the content. So I think people have gone too far that one way, they have gone too far into amplification and not spending enough time on content creation. My advice to people, and this is the advice I follow, and feel free to ignore it, but I would say spend 90% of your time creating something which is truly remarkable, and then 10% of your time promoting it, because it should be far easier to promote if you do that. So that would be my advice that said I spent two days watching 300 TV ads and got nobody listening to the podcast. So take it with a heavy pinch of salt.

Nicole Gottselig: 26:00

What I take away most from this episode is the importance of really slowing down quality over quantity and effort consistency and not being so hung up with these like you said, these numbers, these algorithms, what you're building is actually a community and people who want to be part of what you're doing, your newsletter list so you own that. You know, Tiktok, Facebook, all of that, they can't take that away from you. So yeah, and you're building that connection with your audience. So that's really, I think, is really admirable in these times as well. And that's why we do podcasts like this, to share this with people who really do want to make a difference to themselves, to others, and to leave their own mark in this world. So I always love seeing you speaking to you. Every time we have some kind of interaction, I always leave feeling like I knew something more than what I came in with. So I think that's one of your gifts, is you share your knowledge so freely with people, and you really take the time to help people actually do better in their jobs and their lives. So grateful to have you here, Phill, and

Unknown: 27:02

it's been wonderful. Good talk to Phill day. Thank

Phill Agnew: 27:06

you so much for having me, and really appreciate you taking the time to ask me all these questions. It's nice to actually think about these things myself and Marvin and just cracking on with the day. So thank you for having me. Thanks for being part of this episode of Connect With Purpose. If you found today's conversation inspiring, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps us reach more listeners like you who are seeking meaningful stories and insights, and remember, living with purpose isn't some far off destination, it's a journey that we're all on together. So if you aren't living your purpose fully right now. Don't worry, you're still alive. Your mission on earth is not complete. So until next time, I'm Nicole gottslag, and this is connect with purpose.

Mark Glucki: 27:52

Thanks for joining us on connect with purpose, produced by Titan One. Connect With Purpose is hosted by Nicole Gottselig. Executive Producer Mark Glucki, producer Sian Sue. Editor and Sound Design by Fina Charleson, show creator Scott Lanaway, special thanks to Bernard Magri at Beast Collective and Mark Edwards editing Monica low and Dave Chau design and Charlie the office dog. Do you have an inspiring story? Or maybe you know someone who's followed their passion to find a new purpose. Reach out at connectwithpurpose.ca. We'd love to hear from you.