Side-Hustles 101
Day 26 / 365
I’ve been fascinated by money, and ways I could make some, from a really young age. And the usual “go to college and get a job” was not something I was after.
Over the years, I have seen lots of people use the time after their jobs to create a second source of income on the side. I myself have always had multiple secondary sources of income other than my full-time job. Now that I don’t have a full-time job, I wanted to try out a new side hustle.
One thing for sure that I have learned is that a side hustle is not the same thing as a hobby. While it might make you money, it would always be really hard work. So it’s best to choose something that excites you, and that you would be motivated to do even when the returns are not so great.
To get inspiration for a new idea, I thought I would list some ideas that I know already work for other people.
Selling Stuff Online
I know so many people who want to start their own online shop. They want to use their artistic abilities to create stuff and sell them. But they never do it, because they think that it would be a tough thing to set up. How will they figure out the website? or online payments? or managing orders and shipping them?
Selling stuff online has become ridiculously easy these days. I recently read a post where a guy was using MidJourney to come up with cool covers for notebooks. He would then create a pdf with that cover, add 100s of blank pages to it and upload it to amazon as an ebook. Amazon would take care of everything else, from printing it to shipping it to the customers.
If you want to sell something that you make yourself, Shopify is a great platform to make a website quickly, and it will take care of payments as well. And there are lots of companies to take care of shipping for you as well.
Freelancing / Part-time jobs
If you have the skills, freelancing is a great way to make some money on the side. This is something that has worked for me as well.
What can you work on? I think that for anything that you are doing in your 9–5 job, there would be a version of that job that you could do as a freelancer. But the most sought-after skills are Coding, Design, and Product Management.
For Non-Tech people, marketing, content writing, etc. has lots of potential for freelance as well.
The tough part is getting the projects. While there are sites online that you could use, what has worked best for me is just lots and lots of networking.
Making a Youtube Channel
I have a theory that it's not that hard to make money on Youtube, it's just that most people are not willing to try. That includes me as well.
What we see mostly are Youtube Channels with millions of subscribers and of course, it takes a lot of work to be something like that, but there are lots of channels below 100k subs that make significant money as well.
This one excites me the most because this is something where you don't get paid by the hours. There’s an upper limit to how much money you can make freelancing, cause you only have 24 hours in a day. But every video you make is an asset, with the potential to keep making money for you for a long long time.
I think I got a bit carried away with this post, but I still have a lot to write on this subject. I’ll get to it in a follow up post.