you cover monthly expenses or to meet some specific financial obligation, then choose one that comes with “guaranteed” — or at least predictable — income. Think of these types of side hustles as having “lockstep income” — in other words, the income you make from your side hustle moves more or less in lockstep with the effort that you spend on that side hustle.
You don’t necessarily need to do a gig-economy job or a part-time job in pursuit of predictable income. Most of the time, a real estate–oriented side hustle such as a second home that you lease out, or a condo at a resort location that you rent through Airbnb or Vrbo, can also provide somewhat predictable income.
But what about the various monetized videos that Miguel, Mark, and Max plan to do? Or whatever Sandy decides to do related to his recently rediscovered sports cards and memorabilia? True, none of those side hustles could turn out to be a winner … or each could bring in ginormous amounts of money!
Dhiraj creates a techie course that he uploads to Udemy. He spends three solid months on the course: recording and then editing the videos, creating assessments, producing the MP4 files, and then uploading everything to the account that he creates on the Udemy platform. As shown in Figure 2-3, Dhiraj spends 200 hours from the time he begins work on his course until the course is published. During that time, he makes absolutely no money at all from the course.
The course starts slowly, but over the next three months (until the six-month point) Dhiraj pulls in $2,500. Not bad, especially because during those first three months that the course is active, he does almost no additional work! Basically, he’s sitting back and letting the money roll in, which means that he has now crossed the threshold and is earning passive income.
FIGURE 2-3: A successful passive-income side hustle.
Over the next six months, Dhiraj pulls in another $23,000 ($8,000 in the second three months that the course is active, and then $15,000 during the following three months). During this entire time (refer to Figure 2-3), Dhiraj is still doing almost no work; in fact, he spends only about 25 additional hours after the course is published answering emails from people who purchased the course or maybe doing a small update here and there to include some new topic and keep his course fresh and up to date.
However, those three guys — Max, Mark, and Miguel — could also theoretically make little or no money from their videos. In fact, the same fate could befall Dhiraj and his adventures into online course development as a side hustle. Figure 2-4 shows a different outcome for Dhiraj’s course on Udemy.
Dhiraj still spends 200 hours of his time creating and publishing his course. Now, though, instead of $25,500 in income just in the first year (and with momentum on his side, probably indicating an even better second year!), he brings in only $325 for the entire year. At least as of the first year, Dhiraj earns less than $2 per hour for all the time that he put into his side hustle. Not good!
FIGURE 2-4: An unsuccessful passive-income side hustle.
You also have financial considerations on the investment and expense side of your side hustle. Suppose you want to start an online boutique and sell leisurewear. You could line up suppliers — many of whom will have minimum order amounts — and set aside a bedroom in your home as a “warehouse” where you’ll stash all the inventory that you buy from your suppliers. Be prepared to spend a fair amount of money on inventory! And ask yourself what will happen if your sales estimates are incorrect and you’re stuck with all that inventory that you just paid a bundle for?
Alternatively, you could find suppliers who do drop shipping, where the suppliers themselves actually pack and ship the orders and you never have to stock — and more important, preemptively purchase — the products that you hope to sell. You’ll typically make less with drop shipping than you would by fulfilling your own orders, but you also have a lot less money at risk if your side hustle comes up short of what you thought it would, sales-wise.
Your Side-Hustle Clock and Calendar
Some side hustles have fairly rigid schedules. Jack can’t just decide on the fly what days of the week or time of the day he’ll teach his community college classes next semester. Cindy’s day job limits her to weekends for her bartending gigs.
Other side hustles give you far more flexibility, at least when it comes to when you’ll record videos, or pack and ship orders for your online boutique, or spend many hours handcrafting jewelry.
Max, Mark, and Miguel all plan to create online videos that they’ll then monetize for their respective side hustles. Miguel decides to do a new bartending-related video every week. Mark, however, figures that a new small business accounting video every two weeks is enough for his intended audience and fits better with his available time to record, edit, and polish the videos before uploading and publishing them. Max, on the other hand, settles on a far more fluid schedule for his “monetizing himself” videos. Some weeks, he’ll do two or three videos, and then he may pause for a couple of weeks until he does another two or three.
