Alan R. Simon - Side Hustles For Dummies

Doing hair, nails, or makeup for other people

Doing a little bit of part-time plumbing, electrical work, or other skilled handyman-related tasks

Walking dogs, doing pet-care visits during the day, or staying overnight at someone’s house for pet sitting

Helping people pack their household goods and do a local move

Many gig-economy side hustles are service-related:

Using your personal vehicle to provide ridesharing

Shopping for and delivering groceries

Delivering restaurant meals to people’s homes

For many service-oriented side hustles — grocery shopping and delivery or pet sitting, for example — you don’t need to make a significant upfront financial investment. Even if you’re providing, say, local moving services, you can still get into the side-hustle game without shelling out big bucks for a box truck large enough to move a household’s worth of furniture and boxes. You can set your side-hustle business up where every time somebody hires you, you head to Hertz, U-Haul, or some other place that rents moving trucks by the hour or by the day, and bill your customers for the cost.

Cindy has decided that she’s going to be a weekend bartender, mostly for home parties. She may need to purchase a few supplies to have on hand — a couple of bottle openers, a few corkscrews for wine, and maybe some drink stirrers — just in case the place where she’s bartending doesn’t have what she needs. But for the most part, Cindy’s side hustle involves performing some specific service — bartending, in her case — for some defined period of time.

When it comes to selling products for your side hustle, there are typically two different paths you can take:

Buying products from manufacturers or wholesalers

Making your own products that you’ll then sell

No matter which product-sale path you choose, chances are, you’ll need to make a larger investment in your side hustle — both initially and on an ongoing basis — than you would if you were instead doing weekend bartending like Cindy or doing ridesharing through Uber or Lyft. Make sure your side hustle business plans (see Chapter 4) take these financial considerations into account!

Tasha and Breanna both absolutely love fashion, and both are intensely interested in starting some sort of side hustle. Tasha decides that she’s going to provide personal-shopping services, helping other people choose stylish clothes and accessories to fit their budgets. Basically, Tasha will be providing contract services — the same side-hustle family as what Cindy will be doing for her bartending gigs.

Breanna, on the other hand, is thinking bigger. She wants to build a website that she’ll use to sell women’s clothes and fashion accessories. She’ll find the right suppliers for print T-shirts, blouses, pants, skirts, denim jackets — you name it! Then she’ll put their products on her website and, hopefully, bring in customers through social media marketing. Basically, Breanna’s side hustle is almost indistinguishable from any other online retailer, other than the fact that she’ll be running her online boutique during evenings and on weekends when she’s not doing her day job.

Sarah also has a thing for the latest fashions, and she’s also very interested in starting some sort of a side hustle. Just like Breanna, Sarah really likes the idea of building a website and selling products. Unlike Breanna, however, Sarah doesn’t plan to search for suppliers for what she plans to sell. Sarah started making jewelry back in college — initially just for herself, but eventually a piece here and there to sell to her friends. Back in college, she just sold her jewelry to friends at cost (basically, she didn’t make any money — she just charged her friends for the cost of the materials).

Now, though, Sarah wants to turn her jewelry-making into an ongoing side hustle. She designs about a dozen bracelets, another dozen rings, some earrings, and some necklaces for her initial product offerings. She makes a couple of each item to have on hand and plans to custom-make new items as orders come in (at least for now).

Miguel, the accountant in Boston, wants to do something related to bartending for a side hustle. Miguel isn’t interested in actually doing bartending, building a website to sell bartending supplies, or anything along those lines. He’s after Internet stardom! (Well, sort of… .)

Miguel’s side hustle will be creating a series of short videos — each one about five minutes long — that he’ll post on YouTube, TikTok, or some other video site. Each video will show Miguel making some sort of unique craft cocktail (an espresso martini in one video, special margaritas in another video), tasting and rating the latest vintage of popular wines, or demonstrating new bartending-related items (cocktail shakers, glasses, wine openers, and so on).

Miguel’s side-hustle aspirations involve more than just trying to become known as “that cocktail and wine guy” or a similar tagline. He wants to make money from his side hustle, just as Cindy will do from her bartending services. In Miguel’s case, he plans to earn money from:

Ads placed alongside his videos after they become fairly popular

Affiliate marketing payments from products he uses and discusses in his videos

Miguel’s coworker Mark also has the same idea: to create and upload videos that he’ll then try to monetize through ads. Mark, however, knows next to nothing about bartending. In Mark’s case, accounting not only is his day job, but will also become the foundation of his soon-to-be-launched side hustle. Mark plans to create a series of videos that he’ll publish on YouTube covering accounting do’s and don’ts for people doing a side hustle. (Talk about meta!)

About a year passes, and Mark’s side-hustle accounting videos are doing fairly well. Every so often, someone emails him and asks if he has an actual course in accounting that’s available for purchase. Mark soon figures, “What the heck, I’ll try it!” He creates new accounting-related videos but now, instead of uploading them to YouTube, he packages them into a beginner’s course and an intermediate course that he publishes on Udemy. He sets a list price of $44.99 for each course, and before long, he’s earning a couple thousand dollars a month from his Udemy courses.

If your side hustle is going to involve creating content — say, videos — you have two main avenues available to you:

Online courses that you sell to viewers who sign up

Free content that you post on YouTube, TikTok, or some other video service that you monetize through ad-related revenue or affiliate marketing links

If you head down the paid-course road, you typically earn money in several ways. People can directly purchase your course, with the financial transaction being a simple, straightforward “they pay the price upfront, then they can watch.” Most online learning sites, however, also have some type of subscription service where customers pay a flat fee every month and get access to as many courses as they want during that month. If your course is available through a subscription service (like Udemy or LinkedIn Learning), the service will figure out how much to pay you (and all the other content providers) at the end of each month or reporting period. They usually use some sort of formula where they