Here are all the side hustles I have done from 2016 and onwards. And lessons learned. I will break it down into 2 pipelines: services/products and real estate.
This breakdown is because the lessons learned in one bucket iterate the same bucket. I haven’t found lessons learned in real estate to businesses, nor vice versa.
Why?#
9-5s are a fine way to make money, especially if you make 6 figures.
But a single source of income is risky. If you’re fired, your income drops to 0. A good income might fall if a business does poorly, but it won’t be 0.
Conventional thinking says
If you get fired, you can always get a new job.
This is true, but only up to a certain point. I know many older folks (50s-60s) who get laid off and can’t find a job. There’s ageism in the market, even if companies won’t admit it.
Side hustles are a good way to diversify income.
Side hustles build skills over time, so by the time you get fired in your 50s, you should have enough skills to run a moderately successful business. Assuming you start in your 20s, that’s 30 YoE before you have to go big time.
Services/products#
2016 - 2019: SMMA#
Tai Lopez + Brandon Carter did a collab to sell an SMMA course. My thinking was my max downside was $997, and my max upside was a lot more.
I did about $12K across 3 years, but it was a lot of work and not much money. Many aren’t good on camera and still aren’t, even after lots of coaching.
Many will haggle and want you to do free work.
Not to mention clients are never happy.
2X ROAS? Why isn’t it 3X ROAS?
3X ROAS? Why isn’t it 10X ROAS for my obscure course on how to pass the barber exam?
2017: Service arbitrage, local SEO, Etsy Printables#
I wanted to sprint a bunch of side hustles and see what’s best for me. So I did each of the below for only 1-2 months.
Service / contractor arbitrage (30 days)#
I saw a YouTube video talking about how you can sell services in one place, and then have Fiverr contractors fulfill the orders.
So I sold logo designs for $60 on Thumbtack and paid designers on Fiverr $20 to fulfill them.
The problem is that each time you message a lead on thumbtack, you get charged $10. So your conversion rate needs to be pretty high.
All in all, I earned about $200 after about 10 projects. This is due to the thumbtack fees, but also due to people not paying (Thumbtack at the time did not enforce anything).
While gross margins were nice, net margins were trash. So I stopped.
Local SEO (30 days)#
The same guru on YouTube recommended cold-emailing / calling businesses on Google Maps that aren’t listed.
You list their business on Google Maps for free and upsell them SEO services.
I landed one for about $100/mo for 2 months. I wasn’t able to get any results for them, so I gave this up.
And this is just reminiscent of the SMMA clients.
Instead of a retainer, another business model is to work for free and charge per lead. But this is hard to enforce as the call logs can show they have a few leads, but the business owner could just deny that they were leads or claim they’re old customers.
Etsy printables (60 days)#
Pivoting to products, I sold Etsy printables. These are digital PDFs clients can print out.
To learn, I bought a $29 course from Warrior Forum. They advocated selling PDFs that people need for life events. These are events that everyone goes through: weddings, funerals, going to college, buying a first house, etc.
Reason’s because these will always be evergreen. There will be always new people getting married, going to college, and so on.
I greased the algorithm by having friends buy PDFs from me, and I’d Venmo their money back. Over a few years, this made around $1600 net.
This is not a lot of money.
I liked this business model because I can create things to sell for free with InDesign. Impressions were also free. But making many PDFs to sell took 100s of hours. And I’d need to sell tons of these $3-$10 PDFs to make money.
This took twice as long as the other hustles because making the PDFs was so time-consuming.
2019 - 2022: Dropshipping#
The main problem with Etsy was the time cost of designing new products, only to have it not sell.
If I have to test out 10s of products for one to sell, I want to:
- Eliminate the time it takes to make the product.
- Scale the product so I can get rich.
Dropshipping fits this model as I don’t have to create the product at all. And I can force scale with paid ads.
I did many courses and went to many conferences. But each product I sold lost money.
In 2020, I pivoted from selling on FB ads to Google ads. However, as I was in Hong Kong when I ran the ads despite registering the LLC in the US, I got insta-banned. Since this was during the 2020 elections and companies were wary of fake political news, it was very hard to get back a banned account.
Unluckily, a real estate friend introduced me to a New Zealand guy who could run ads for me.
We’d split costs and profits 50/50. I did most of the work:
- Website design and copy
- Sourcing products
- Dealing with vendors
- Dealing with 3PL and warehouses
- Building a supply chain at scale
He ran Smart Campaigns on Google and answered customer emails. Answering email was too stressful for this fucking loser. He had to pop Xanax if he had to answer 5 emails, so I got him a VA. Unfortunately, he micromanaged the hell out of him, so he was not able to outsource simple work.
Anyway, he led me to believe that it was 50/50 but took a bunch of money out of the account. When I asked him to put some more money back in since I’m doing most of the work and am 10K deep in more than him, he freaked out.
After some negotiations and threatening to sue, he paid me $3K of the $10K.
I stopped dropshipping after due to a sour taste in my mouth, and also the realization that e-commerce doesn’t scale great either.
2021 - 2022: NFT Bot#
I learned about NFT in 2021 when my girlfriend (now fiancee) told me to buy Damien Hirst’s NFT in August. I bought it at 8ETH, and it went up to 12ETH on the same day.
Trading manually, I lost money.
So I built a bot to do arbitrage.
If someone listed something significantly lower than the floor price (i.e. a typo), my bot will buy it immediately and sell it at the floor price.
On a bad month, I net about $10K.
On a good month, I net about $30K.
I stopped a few months later when a smart contract of mine got hacked, and I lost 6.3ETH.
I was still profitable but didn’t think it ethical to have a business model capitalizing only on others’ mistakes. Especially when those mistakes are unintended. For example, if someone had a long position against my short in an overpriced stock, it is a fair mistake. Happy to take their money. But if someone listed something for 1/10th of the floor price, it is a mistake they probably didn’t mean to make and probably would not consent to selling at that price.
Just like how I didn’t consent to 6.3ETH being stolen from my smart contract.
2022 - present: SaaS#
Unlike the NFT bot, SaaS can provide value to users. And much of the same skill: programming.
To date, I’ve built quite a few products with varying success. I’ve netted around:
- 2022: (1818.35)
- 2023: 2816.61
- 2024 YTD: (1356.91)
In total: $$ 2816.61-1356.91-1818.15 = -358.45 $$ This is a lot of work for negative income. I’ve been coding a lot and trying to sell products. Now, I’m pivoting to doing a lot of market research first and only coding up a product once there’s enough interest.
I’m also interested in pivoting from B2B (which most SaaS gurus recommend) to B2C. Reason being some cracked teenagers seem to sell B2C products in the app store at $4-$5 a pop and can still make millions in ARR.
2023 - present: Etsy premium signs#
Instead of selling printable PDFs, I pivoted to selling signs.
Unlike the PDFs, these are very simple signs. Just text + color.
While most do not sell, they cost $39 to $199.
Here’s my top line.
- 2023: 5830.03
- 2024 YTD: 2413.16
Net margin’s around 35%. So: $$ \lparen5830.03 + 2413.16\rparen \times 35\% = \$2885.11 $$ So around 2.8K net. All this took about 6 hours of work (including customer service). Not bad.
Real Estate#
Even though we can fill ocean with concrete to make land now, we still say:
Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.
2016 - 2020: Single-family real estate investing#
So I bought out of state SFRs in Memphis.
First property I split with my friend, at $139K in early 2016. In 2018, I realized SFR growth will not be as good as the stock market. So I sold my half to my friend and profited about $20K (or a double) when it was appraised at 180K. He sold this last year in 2023 for 260K so he did quite well.
The second property I bought myself at 118,900 in late 2016. Sold during COVID for 209,900. My profits were only $60K in total though. I lost money renting the place out, and I spent about $15K renovating the place for sale. Put another way, if I had left the property vacant for 4 years, I would have net $75K instead. Down payment plus closing was about $20-$23K, so it would have been a little bit more than a triple.
2017 - 2021: Airbnb arbitrage#
Tenants wouldn’t pay rent, so I evicted them. And when I did, they would smash things. Property management is too lazy to pursue extra money to pay for damages, so I ate the costs.
Airbnb arbitrage is a way to prevent this.
Also called ’lease to lease’, this real estate strategy has 3 steps:
- Convince a landlord to let you rent their unit.
- Furnish the unit.
- Sublet the unit on Airbnb for a profit.
In Airbnb, people will pay before they arrive. And you can set it as nonrefundable. So eviction wasn’t ever a problem.
My friend and I went into this business model.
Things went well the first 2 years and we went up to 14 units. But 2 major problems came up:
- We wanted to outsource everything, which made costs skyrocket. We made so much money we thought there was no way we’d spend too much in outsourcing. We were wrong and 15% net margins got squeezed to almost nothing.
- Q4 is dreadful as there’s lot of vacancies. Except in 2018 when we filled out Q4 and was looking forward to a great year. But in October 2018, someone installed a not-so-hidden camera in the smoke detector in the bedroom. Airbnb cancelled all our reservations and we lost $30K a month.
We recovered by getting leads from Craiglist, Facebook, TravelersHaven, and other platforms. But as Airbnb is 90%+ of the market share, there was no way for us to expand further. So I wound operations down.
We lost at least $30K each by the time everything was done. Another $20K of investor money.
2018 - present: Syndication investing#
The problem with SFRs is the headache.
And the problem with Airbnb is while the margins a much faster when everything goes right, you’re relying on Airbnb to not ban you.
Real estate syndications solve all this. A syndication is when a bunch of people pool together money, and instead of buying a home to rent out, they take on much bigger projects. This is good because:
- No more headaches. There is no decision making as an LP.
- Not relying on Airbnb.
- Higher margins than SFRs as you get economies of scale. Example: Instead of 8-10% management fee, it is ~3%.
Below’s a listing of all the projects I have been involved in. Projects with an asterisk (*) are projects I am still in. The rest have completed.
| Project name | Contributions | Distributions |
|---|---|---|
| Fund 7* | $100,000 | $2,735 |
| Fund 5 | $50,000 | $78,910 |
| GA Apartment 1 | $50,000 | $68,897 |
| Sonoma Rebuild* | $45,045 | $19,435 |
| Loan | $100,000 | $100,583 |
| Total | $345,045 | $270,561 |
Fund 5 did well. I went in and within a year make 28K on 50K.
GA Apartment 1 was OK. It took about 3 years to make 18K on 50K.
Sonoma Rebuild is not an apartment project. They wanted to rebuild single family homes after Camp Fire in 2018. After 6 years, they will shut operations down and will not have much money to give back. So I will likely be down 20K on this.
The loan was just a hard money loan that pays 6%. I only held it for a little before transitioning the money to Fund 7.
Fund 7 is doing terribly. I like this syndicate because they underwrite very conservatively. Unfortunately, not conservative enough. Ever since 2022, this has underperformed and there has been barely any distributions. This is due to a market downturn.
This is likely to be a very long hold, and will unlikely have high IRR compared to, say, S&P.
All in all, this is a good way to diversify away from the stock market and gets me exposure to the real estate market without the headaches. However, as you can see above, it can be risky still.
I don’t know how I feel about this asset class in general. More on this later.