Correspondence Regarding Side Income Secrecy

The project was not announced.

The reason given, internally, was that announcing it would create a deadline, and the project was not ready for a deadline. This was accurate. The project was also not ready to remain private indefinitely, which was the other available option and was not examined.

This is the opening condition of side income secrecy: the project exists, the person running it is active, and the project is classified as preparation rather than operation because preparation carries no accountability.

The first consequence was administrative. A name was needed for use in private contexts: a bank account, a registration form, a bio on a platform used only for research. The name was chosen. The name was not announced. The project now had a name known to one person, which gave it a legal structure and an identity but not a public existence.

After the first month of operation without announcement, the administrative work had expanded to include scheduling, a Notion workspace, a set of templates, and several partially completed drafts of the announcement that had not yet been published. Visible preparation counts as revenue-adjacent activity until the first customer forces a different standard.

The second consequence was conversational. Someone asked what the person had been working on. The answer given was accurate and vague in equal proportion. It covered the category without naming the project. The person asking was satisfied. The person answering was surprised to notice they had become practiced at this.

After several months, the project remained private. The pressure of privacy began to resemble the pressure of going public. Both required maintenance. One required explaining progress. The other required hiding it.

By 2022, side hustle culture had made preparation itself a visible activity. Courses, frameworks, templates, community memberships, and accountability groups were available for people who had not yet started. The infrastructure for starting was better than the infrastructure for being finished.

This suited most projects at most stages.

The announcement is still being drafted.