Do you love Side hustles? I think you will say yes for sure. There are many side hustles out there which can make you money. Some of these can be scaled to create full-time income and some are not so lucrative.
I am so happy to have Peter Koch from Dollarsanity.com sharing his story of side hustling. Let us hear from him how he is building his side hustle.
Read the story of a side hustler in his own words
Chasing the next big thing – My story of side hustling
Most children get their first pocket money by mowing lawns in front of their neighbours’ homes. When I was a kid, I had a different idea in mind. You see, it occurred to me that being a gardener isn’t necessarily the highest paid job in the world and I wanted to explore my options. It didn’t take long before I realized that most of my friends were fairly lazy. There had to be a way to capitalize on that.
So, I did what any honest young man would do. I tried to find the things they wanted the most and made sure they received it, during the very next day at school. Would you care to take a guess on what it was? Well, at that age, the answer is fairly obvious – it was candy.
I often found myself wondering, is it really that hard to just go to the supermarket and buy stuff that you want? Apparently, that happened to be the case for a lot of people, as my clientele grew with each passing day. Things got out of hand pretty quickly. It got so ridiculous that I had to carry a separate backpack, just to have enough room for all of the sweets.
Compared to my lawn-mowing friends, I was quite the entrepreneur and it showed, at least when it comes to how much money we were able to generate. Unfortunately, once the school year was over, my business went down the drain in a hurry. Well, at least it was good while it lasted.
Becoming one of the pioneers of eBay
Still, I failed to learn my lesson up to this point and continued with small side hustles that brought instant profit. To be fair, I was still a young man, as I just signed up for college when the next idea popped into my mind.
Back in the day, most of my friends loved watching movies, so I presumed that there was a strong market for this sort of stuff. It turned out that my intuition was correct once again. The difference was that this time, I intended to go global, so I turned to the Internet as my window into the world. When it comes to my product of choice, the bootleg DVD’s seemed like a great place to start.
Now, I only needed to find a good marketplace to present my products, and eBay offered a great opportunity to do so. Back in the day, the copyright laws weren’t as strict as they are now and you were able to get away with this sort of stuff. Even better, the competition was pretty much non-existent, so it was like taking candy from a baby. It lasted for a good six months before I had to call it quits.
Throwing down the biggest party of the year
My next business venture was far greater and much more ambitious. I wasn’t going solo here either, which was a big change compared to what I was previously used to. Because we all attended the same dorm at the time and had a large group of friends, we tried to leverage that to our advantage.
Once again, I applied the same logic. If kids like candy, what do college students like the most? To the party, of course! With the New Year’s Eve slowly approaching, we decided to organize the most insane party the city has ever seen! Well, not exactly. We wanted to book a small venue for our closest group of friends, but as it happens, things sometimes take a strange turn.
Instead of a small pub, we ended up renting the largest place in the entire city. It was plenty stressful getting it all together, but luckily, we began working on it in September, so we had just enough time to see it through till the end of the year. You might be wondering, what were the results? Only the best party the city has seen in the last couple of years!
It should come as no shock that the profit was also pretty hefty as well. It’s safe to say that I haven’t seen a larger pile of cash since! Once we paid everyone off and divided the profit among ourselves, I had just enough money to buy the property that is the place where my home can be found nowadays. This party served as an eye-opener which showed me that anything is possible if you give it your best shot. Mind you, I was still a college kid at the time. With some experience and added knowledge, only the sky was the limit.
Did you ever think about owning a bar?
Online side hustles are terrific, but they fade in comparison to the money you can make from good old traditional jobs. Here’s a perfect illustration of that claim. Driven by my previous success as a party organizer, I decided to open my own bar! If you think this decision came out of nowhere, you should’ve seen the reaction from my family members. They thought I was losing my mind.
Luckily, I was able to get them on board eventually, which meant that there were no obstacles to my plans. Being that I had a huge group of friends and acquaintances, I knew that I’ll have a steady source of income, if only I managed to play my cards right. As the luck would have it, the bar turned out to be extremely popular.
Things got so out of hand that I even lost a bunch of my “friends” because I couldn’t provide them with the VIP treatment they felt was necessary. I always laughed at the notion that being a bar owner was the toughest job in the world until I sensed it on my skin. Trust me, there are plenty of less stressful ways to make a living.
If you are interested in this line of work, know that you can make a lot of money from it, I’m not even gonna lie. Just be prepared to spend a lot of long nights at your bar, ironing out the kinks that come along the way. Nowadays, my bar is sold, as I just didn’t have the energy required to keep up. As my grandparent used to say, I’m not a young man anymore…
Amazon was my first serious online business venture
Selling on Amazon was my main preoccupation for a very long period of time. Besides work and family, I dedicated the largest amount of my energy in an attempt to master the Amazon algorithm and I can proudly claim that I was able to achieve that goal! By knowing which products are best sellers, when to put my items on sale and how to come out on top in the search bar, I was able to get a leg up on the competition and establish myself as one of the best sellers.
I even became an authority on this topic, which leads to a lot of interviews and collaborations that I never truly expected. It turns out that people are more than willing to listen to you speak if they think you have the knowledge on a particular subject. If only my children would share that same notion from time to time, I would be the happiest man in the world.
Selling rights to some funny home videos
I find it peculiar that most people aren’t even aware of this side hustle idea, as it’s one of the simplest possible forms of making money. Don’t believe me? All you have to do is upload your content to websites such as Rumble or Newsflare and your part of the job is done. After that’s completed, all you can do is wait and hope that others will find your videos amusing.
When I say others, I think of media members and people in charge of finding viral content. Selling videos to news is the name of the game, to put it shortly. If your content gets popular in time, you’ll lose the rights to sell the same video to other media, but you’ll get handsomely compensated for your efforts.
It’s not as if you can only make a couple of bucks by doing this either. Since I started getting involved in this business, I made a couple of thousand dollars and all without putting any effort into it. It’s nothing major, but it’s basically free money, so where’s the downside?
Fiverr served as a simple cash grab
Speaking of free money, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t mention Fiverr. One day, I came up with the idea of opening a gig, where I presented myself and shared my expertise on the subject at hand. Being that I established my authority on the topic of selling on Amazon, I simply put the title as “I will tell you what you should sell on Amazon”. For $50, I briefly thought that no one would be interested, but I still gave it a shot.
In fact, I went one step further, providing the option of quick delivery for just $20 extra on the original price. Much to my surprise, three people felt that this was a fair offer, providing me with $200, just like that! It definitely pays off to test the limits of the market every now and again.
YouTube was a dud
Don’t even get me started on YouTube! I guess it shouldn’t be all that surprising that such a popular platform pays the users so poorly, they had to do that in order to get to where they are. Still, while it’s possible to gain some views over time, the level of competition is pretty fierce. There’s a good reason why most of your favorite content creators call this their full time job.
When it comes to me personally, I simply didn’t have the time, or the willingness to invest so much of my time for such small profit margins, so I stopped making videos altogether. Still, even now, I’m good for about $20 a month, based on my previous work alone. It’s not a fortune, but it beats having nothing to show for.
Have you ever heard about Loansharking?
Loansharking on Reddit was a fairly stupid idea, but I did it just for the fun of it either way. In case you’re not familiar with this side hustle, it consists of joining a community on Reddit where users lend money to one another, for a small interest rate.
What is the first thought that crossed your mind immediately? Probably that this community is filled with people trying to hustle others for money. Now, I won’t claim that you’ll never see that, as it even happened to me, but it’s not as often as you might imagine.
Ultimately, I was able to make my money back, thanks to PayPal policies, but it was a hassle and a pain in the neck that simply was not worth my effort. With that in mind, it didn’t take long before I gave up on this side hustle.
Blogging has quickly become my big love
Who knew that a college student who loved throwing parties, who later on went to become a pub owner, would end up becoming a blogger? Still, the life of an Amazon seller and a plethora of different business ventures have ingrained important lessons into the back of my mind and now, I was willing to share them with the world.
However, if you think that the life of a blogger requires only writing and not much else, think again. I would say that I spend at least 50% of my time talking to other bloggers, trying to make a collaboration of some sorts. Additionally, a huge chunk of my time also goes into advertising, as the readers won’t flock to your website by themselves, no matter how much you wish them to.
When I say advertising, I don’t necessarily speak about investing money, though. Most of the time, it includes spending countless hours on Reddit, Quora, Facebook and other social media platforms where people gather around to share thoughts and ideas. Some might say that these sort of tactics are a shot in the dark, but I have the numbers on my side which prove differently.
I have plenty of big plans for my blog that are yet to come into reality, but I now know that the road might take me in a whole different direction. We’ll just have to wait and be ready to seize the opportunity once it presents itself!
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