Alright, this is a 10 Scary-Good Side Hustles That Make Real Money. What's up? What's up, Nick? Hello for here. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show because your 9-5 may make you a living. You can 5-9, it makes you alive. Happy Halloween to you. This is a fantastic holiday in the words of Greg Barron. It teaches kids some really valuable life skills. You get dressed, you go to work, and you get paid. In candy! So today we've got 10 Scary-Good Side Hustles. Some more Halloween related to the others, and to help me out is a man of many
Side Hustles. You know I'm as the host of the Mitch Pursuits Podcast from 201creative.com. Jared Bellman. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Hey Nick, this is gonna be really fun. What a fun theme that we have here, and I love the list and the running order we're gonna be going through in terms of some of these really cool side hustles. Well, excited as well. I'm a long time Mitch Pursuits listener, and I feel like it's a long time coming to have you on the show. And obviously a lot of overlap between the two audiences. So I know we'll have lots of listeners familiar with Jared as well. I want to tee this off with a side hustle.
So they came across my desk from Ebiz Facts this year, and this the headline is $2,000 a month reacting to horror movies. And so this is Catherine Vogel's YouTube channel. It's called Catwatches Horror Movies. At the time of this recording, she's over 80,000 subscribers started a little over two years ago. So she's two years deep into this. I assume Side Hustle Project. And some of her videos, which is, like the headline is like, you know I'm freaked out by horror movies. Let's watch them together. And it's just her reacting to these for the first time and screaming and just get
scared. Are you a horror movie fan? I like cannot do horror movies. No, no, I was going to say like I have a funny story with my girlfriend in college and we were going to see I think the ring and we were on our way. I look at finally was like, I don't even like horror movies. What are we doing? And she was like, I don't either. So I love this idea because this is the only way I really watch a horror movie is by its wit somebody like this kind of having fun with it. Yeah, I remember seeing like Blair Witch in high school. And then, you know, probably the next week going on a 50 mile backpacking trip and just it was not I was not in a good place. So I can't do horror movies. Like, you know,
she'd be a comedy any day of the week. But so some of her videos, like she's got her reacting to some of these older classic horror movies like Exorcist and Predator and alien, Silence of the Lambs. Like, these have between 150,000 views and 200,000 views. And so you can plug the you can plug the channel. You can plug any YouTube channel into social blade and it'll estimate the earnings. And like, depending on the niche, there's a huge variety in YouTube RPMs, right. But it says up to $2,000 a month just in in YouTube ad revenue from cat watches.
And then, you know, I think it's a great idea to do this horror movies. Plus, she's got a Patreon campaign or Patreon support cat for this with almost 300 paying members anywhere from $3 to $10 a month. And you get, you know, special bonus footage or you get inside access. I don't know what you're what their different tears are. But pretty well monetized for a side hustle. That's only a couple years deep.
I was blown away in your article by how many people are paying her. I think she said her most popular tears at $10 a month. And I'm thinking like, what do you get for $10 a month? I'm already getting what I need by watching this. And so that's the power of creating a concept, creating an idea.
And once it gets traction, there's usually several layers that can go deeper in that. This is also fun. I don't know if you remember this is going to date me a bit. But this is also a great example of taking a model that already has been proven to work. I remember in high school in college, I think watching something called mystery science theater. And it was a couple of guys who would just watch these old movies that were bad. That was a central premise.
They were like really poorly produced or terrible story lines are really bad acting. They were just bad movies and they would just joke through the whole thing. And that was, I mean, even before the day of YouTube, but they were incredibly popular. And they did this to a lot of movies in a different way.
She's put her own spin on something that was done and successful 20 years ago. Yeah, exactly. It goes back to the pivot and jam framework from the tropical NBA guys. You take somebody else's idea, rip it off, pivot it to a new niche, a new idea. And then jam, go to town and do your thing and see if you can get a following.
So you can get some traction with that. This genre of reaction videos is a tried and true thing. Yeah, you know, we saw it during during the pandemic, like lawyer reacts to, you know, stimulus package bill or writer reacts to this, you know, opening line of some novel.
My friend, Grandpa Aldwyn runs the speaker lab and it was you know him reacting to these famous TED talks and stuff. So formula that can work in a lot of different niches. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of like, you know, my nephew is young and like he will watch on YouTube. People playing a game to both learn.
But actually it kind of it's like a community event, you know, watching on YouTube or live playing the game. So like, you know, this concept exists in so many different areas. It's kind of she's really made a niche out of it.
All right. Next up podcast reactions. We don't watch. We'll visit this podcast with the Winnick. Maybe that's my next side hustle. But that's the first one on this list. You know, making a couple grand a month, probably more when you layer on both the Patreon and the ad sense from Google views. Watch in horror movies. So there's there's a sign also for you. Maybe you pivot that to your own niche and she doesn't even like them. She doesn't even like horror movies.
All right. What's what's next on your list here? What what else have we got? Yeah. So next up is pumpkin carving. I mean, it is it is Halloween here. So why would we not at least jump into something specific to the Halloween hall itself. And this is Mark Evan and Chris Soria. And they started manic pumpkin carvers.com. And basically they carve pumpkins for you.
And obviously it's a very seasonal business, you know, extremely seasonal. And we'll get into some of the other things that are a little bit seasonal like this reminds me of Christmas lights. You know, you always see the signs as you're driving your neighborhood during the Christmas season.
Someone who will come out and hang your Christmas lights for you. But this this business they basically carve pumpkins. And I mean, I was shocked by how much money that they're able to make per pumpkin. Now obviously they do a really good job. They're pretty good at it. They're charging like three figures over a hundred dollars.
For some of these and they're making a pretty good side hustle income. Yeah. This is maniac pumpkin carvers.com. And this truly artworks of art. Like some of the stuff that they're able to create is genuinely impressive. And it's somewhat depressing that it's on such a temporary medium. Okay. We can capture a picture of it. But like next month this pumpkin is going to rot away. But 150 to $700 per pumpkin. And according to side hustle school, they're doing 500 to 1000 pumpkins per season.
And a lot of these are going to be corporate clients, weddings, special events like people who have the budget to spend up to $700 for a custom pumpkin. But that pencils out are estimates out to be over $100,000, maybe $150,000 for a very seasonal business. And I've got to imagine that there's some other job or some other source of income going on the rest of the year. But like, hey, you know, over the course of eight weeks to to cash in a hundred grand.
And pumpkin art, if that's something you love to do, that was really impressed with that one. I mean, you think that obviously you need to be in an area. I mean, they're in Brooklyn. I think I saw. So, you know, they can probably service the greater New York metropolitan area that probably helps. Yeah.
Them get access to it. Like he said, corporate clients and that sort of thing. But I mean, it's also seems somewhat scalable. You know, you got to find some people who are good pumpkin carvers. And you can kind of scale up. I'm sure they're probably not carving a thousand pumpkins, you know, the weekend of Halloween. I'm in assuming that, by the way, but it is interesting to think that, you know, it's actually got some scale that you could build into it if you really wanted to.
Any other food related or like this temporary art thing for any of you people will do like ice sculptures or where it's, you know, it's built just for this event. You know, I guess like a fancy cake decorating type of thing. Like maybe these guys have a corner on the pumpkin market. Is there another niche where you think this might work well?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting is you bring it up my father-in-law ran it for 40 years was an ice carver. That was his business. Okay. Wow. So funny. You brought that up. And so, yeah, he would get hired for a lot of the types of things you just talked about. And he would make ice carvings of a whole different variety of things. So he would do Eiffel towers for French themed parties. He would do statue of Liberty for a New York themed party.
He would so there's a lot of themed parties that aren't just Halloween related. This is a time of year where there's parties for it. But there's every time a year he would do great grad speed. Theme to parties and he would build ice sculpture that's just leaning to the whole theme idea. You know, we got the fall we got the pumpkin we got the Halloween. But these themes apply throughout every holiday and every year.
Yeah, it's just an example of like well, here's a skill that I have that I probably never would have thought anybody would pay money for. It's just a good old time to carve pumpkins and like, hey, I get pretty good at this. And then turning like figuring out how to monetize that. That's kind of inspiring, pretty creative. Now, if you're looking for a little bit of guidance on what what what skills do I have?
What could I turn it to a side hustle? I want to invite you to take our two minute quiz at side hustle nation.com slash quiz. And then based on your answers, I'll make some recommendations on what business models or side hustles might be the best fit for you. The third one on this list is kind of a creepy crawly one and this is Jeff Neal who is running the critter depot.com.
This is a cricket breeding and I think e-commerce business where he sells live crickets to primarily reptile owners like people who need crickets to feed their other pets. He says average he's been doing it for several years average annual profits $30,000 on the side from his day job crickets apparently super easy to breed fast to breed. And then just trying to figure out the shipping regulations about selling live insects on the internet.
This one definitely threw me off. It feels like in our modern era. Wow. Side hustling your way with crickets. But it makes sense. So many people have pets. I mean, at my agency we we do work with some veterinarians. I know for a fact that when they call them the exotics right the exotic animals not the cat the dog the bird but all these other like so that there is a good collection of people that have these types of animals.
And you got to find you got to find food for it sounds like he blew up during covid when maybe the local pet stores weren't open or they weren't I don't know what it was but he has done well with it. City is a bearded dragon. I was kind of intrigued. Didn't know you have a pet bearded dragon. I want to say we had somebody on the show or somebody in the community who had like a bearded dragon niche site early on all about taking care of these.
You know, because it's you find a million one dog sites and probably a site for every specific breed. But okay, we're going to have to go a little more niche if I want to find something maybe a little bit less competitive on that keyword research there.
Growing up I had a pet frog as a kid as a story goes I was fairly young we were a late you know kind of nearby and there were all these tadpoles and I said dad can I can I take a tadpole home he raised it as a frog is like yeah if you catch one we can take it home thinking I never catch one. I don't know how must have that was my day to buy lottery ticket I caught a tadpole.
Okay, so we raised this tadpole up to being a frog and then released him back into the same lake like six months later but we had to go out of the pet store to buy a cricket once in a while and I remember it being quite the process.
Now marketing wise it sounds like Jeff is relying on these like reptile forums like good old forum marketing go where your customers already are whether hanging out in these bearded dragon forums or other reptile forums and hey you know you don't do you have a good cricket dealer if not I'm your guy.
I mean it sounds like he really started by solving his own problem and then he realized there was this need because he's a part of that community and that it's a great way to look if you're looking at what kind of site hustle you might want to go into like what problems do you have in your life that you might have already solved and don't realize other people have a need for it or what problems do you have it maybe you could find a solution for and then see if other people want it.
What is kind of cool about this niche is the others probably some initial crickets that you're going to have to buy and I guess feed but after a while it becomes self perpetuating right it's like they're just kind of keep making more and it's like we have somebody who is doing like plant propagation or selling you know any types of those things where it's like okay I bought the seed once
and now it grows into this thing and I cut off the limbs of it and then those repropagate and it's like it's almost this cool like infinite loop or almost zero cost a good sold you know the farther down the road that you get I thought that was really interesting.
I'm thinking of like sourdough starter and like you know like the home brew and like you know I know you have your starter for that and obviously not very good at any of those things but to your point like I got my mind thinking like this kind of almost self perpetuates itself.
Yeah I think that's one of those really exciting ones we had a guy and that last year who was selling mushrooms out of maybe a spare bedroom I can't imagine that that room smelled very good but it was I want to say 800 bucks a week or something worth of you know mushrooms to local restaurants and farmers markets and just keep it keep it rolling. Amazing.
Alright we'll be back with more Halloween themed side hustles with Jared or right after this being an entrepreneur and being able to work remotely definitely has its perks I've recorded podcasts everywhere from Vietnam to Italy drafted newsletters from Japan hosted mastermind meetings from Spain and up in the middle of the night to get to US business hours and outlined courses in Mexico.
The common thread of all of these trips though is Airbnb we love being able to get exactly what we're looking for in a place to stay and have a more local experience then stay in some giant hotel chain.
And you know me I'm always thinking about the next side hustle idea the next income stream right and one that's at the top of the list is hosting our place on Airbnb while we're traveling that way the house doesn't have to sit empty we could use the income to help pay for the trip and we've heard from several successful Airbnb hosts on the show.
And what's interesting is a lot of them started with almost that exact strategy running their place or even a spare room while they're at town taking inspiration from that you might have an Airbnb right under your nose in fact your home might be worth more than you think you find out how much at Airbnb dot com slash host that's Airbnb dot com slash host to find out how much your home is worth.
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Alright we're back with Jared from 201 creative and the niche pursuits podcast doing some scary good side hustles and number four on this list is an AI baby picture generator like what is your baby going to look like upload your picture and your spouses picture and it matches them together and it gives kind of this age progression like oh at four years old they're going to look like this this was launched by Efon go out of Singapore called our baby AI dot com launched April 2023 charged nine bucks for a set of eight
set of AI created baby pictures I want to there's got to be like a face mash app that have been doing like I don't know if the AI angles necessarily important here I feel like there's been tools to do this for a long time but by December so six seven months later he has crossed over $10,000 in revenue
according to Efon's personal site sold that site this year for an undisclosed five figure some and relied on Google traffic like people were typing in AI baby generator and he was blessed with some some solid SEO and came up on the first page for that then look like he's on the first page anymore I couldn't find our baby AI anymore but he sold it he moved on built a cool little tool and was was making some money with it.
I mean you know I've got I have kids and I know when we were you know doing all the stuff while you know pregnantly up to like they're like hey you want to get that 3d image of your baby and all that I you know it's all it's not it look kind of weird but it is your baby and there's something about it you know and but they never told you what your baby was going to look like after it was born and when it was
four and six I mean it feels like one of the things that you know it's like we talked about already like parties events weddings but also baby like people are willing to kind of spend some money in that category and throwing nine dollars at something probably for most people on a whim my daddy is going like oh my gosh I always knew I'd have a blonde haired kid like I don't think anyone's taking it too seriously but it's probably worth like nine bucks to people and it's just a cool
story and how he really found a price point that seems to have resonated with enough people that you got a viable side has a lot of it.
Yeah it's just almost the novelty factor where you could you could either create it before you have a kid and then like now five years later like hey that was that was pretty accurate or that was way off it is almost this you know surprise you put it in a time capsule kind of thing I'd be curious to see maybe I should upload my wife's and I see like what did it did
generate a kid that looks anything like ours that's actually good point I mean we have no idea how accurate this is to some degree it's going to take years for to I guess the term of its accurate but why not I mean he had fun with the whole thing he's got a post on Twitter my silly website our baby AI that doesn't actually solve a problem is cross ten thousand dollars in total revenues I think he kind of knew it was a fun thing yeah hopefully everybody who bought those pictures thought you know
knows kind of a fun thing yeah are there any other you know one of this AI side hustles would be building you know an internal GPT for organizations or building kind of like a customer response bought for different organizations based on the knowledge base or something like any other you know could be in this fun category or could be in a more useful category but like any any AI assisted side hustles that you might be excited about these days oh man
I'll talk about it maybe if we have time to get into like what kind of side hustles working on but one of the things I'm doing right now is repurposing a lot of my email content that I write for the week and growth newsletter I'm repurposing on medium and medium
really fun because you can kind of I've been doing that but I've also been exploring new topics on medium and just sharing about it a couple months ago my wife and I were having the hardest time meal plan every week and I thought wait a second we know our priorities we know what we like to eat we know what our families like to eat we know all these details how I just write a GPT for it and so I did and so it's a GPT and then you know it's pretty simple for people to follow
but I just thought a month ago I'm like Bill I wonder if you could sell this wonder if you could sell this idea of here's a GPT that's going to build your family a custom meal plan based on you know your preferences your allergies your all the different things you want and actually give you a meal plan every week yeah I mean that's a huge pain point that perpetual question of well you know what's for dinner and you know there's a company's solving it in different ways
obviously from the you know done for you meal kit delivery type of things down to paprika is a meal planning app that's been mentioned cook smarts we've used off and on but yeah if there's you maybe there is this AI assisted type of thing that would be really cool to figure out what's the grocery list right you know what are options that you to go it is could we reuse one ingredient across two or three different meals like we make
enough to have leftovers like there's there's a few different boxes that you could check there and definitely use some tech assist on that my friend even gave me an idea on that he read the articles like you know you could probably do it where you actually just take a picture of your fridge and you're covered and it kind of learns it was sees what you already have so you don't have to go buy that again yeah yeah yeah we already have
a I like it what's the what's the process like you know to make your own meal planning thing or to make your own GPT like what does that even look like how technical do I have to be not at all not at all seriously like we do a lot of AI implementation at our agency but not in a complicated way like you just go to the chat GPT open AI framework and there's a whole section on GPT's and you can create your own it's just it's kind of the classic
analogy of how to best use AI to begin with like the more you give it on the way in the better it's going to do for you clearly tell it what you want it to do so you kind of have to have the goal in mind don't don't go in just kind of brainstorming have the goal in mind and then just start working in all the different things but that's the great thing like you can make the GPT you can play around with it you can test it you can use it you can go back in
and add more to it later so you can say you know let me give you some more information now that I've used this for a week or two okay got it yeah I get up low 10 years of podcast archives and build build something that would be helpful I mean the challenges creating a side hustle through AI is that it's going to be always be changing but the brilliance of using the I to create a side hustle I think is that you know there's low
barriers to entry obviously is a cost for doing it isn't very high but also like to your point a lot of us can get in there and kind of you know use a lot of these no code solutions along with you know some customization and the AI model and come up with some different ideas I mean this guy made it work I think he said in the shower one day for the AI baby you know all the back to the AI baby photo thing you know
and and so it's it's an interesting opportunity it's really an interesting opportunity for a lot of people that was the original idea for this episode like could I make the 100% AI episode and I'm glad we're doing this instead but maybe that day is coming be like well that's kind of a spooky scary futuristic thing like we make a Halloween episode where it's not even it's just Robo Robo Nick but it's we're really here in the
flash very good so that's number four this AI baby generator making a 10 grand total revenue before selling for a ten thousand dollar plus exit there what what's next for us this was fun we're gonna go from AI to like a little bit more of a classic idea and this is a cotton candy vending machines and so this is somebody who basically started with two machines inside of a resort and so they have this kind of story about how they stopped working and etc but basically in their first weekend that
story they talked about was eight hundred dollars in revenue from a machine on a good month now again they're doing it year round it seemed like so summer one machine can make anywhere from six to fifteen K in revenue they have I think ten machines now and so they're up into much higher revenue
I mean this is a really interesting idea because I don't know about in your neighborhood but you've obviously got the the Halloween festivals we've got like my kids at their elementary school they have their little PTA fundraiser festival you've got a lot of the ironically like churches
in the neighborhood that do their fall festivals and you've also got October fest by the way and that's usually an end of September early October so specifically this time of year like the cotton candy vending machine you could use year round but this time of year there's actually a lot of like fall
festivals where these sorts of things would work really well yeah you could rent it out for an event because the machines themselves are maybe a couple thousand bucks and you have some material cost going into that but if he's pulling in eight hundred bucks from one machine on one weekend
like he's making cotton candy like there's not that much material that goes into it and you know this he described there is there is more I mean any vending machine has some any either got to go restock it or you got to go service it like like in this case but he's like I've got
independent contractors on the ground they make this part of their route and they go do this the question is always like she widened the resort think of this if they're if they're having that kind of ROI why didn't the resort just put it in themselves but you know that's that's not the business
that they're in they want to stay in their lane they want to you know delegate this little extra service to somebody else this is distinctive vending dot com if you want to check it out so he's got the thing he's got a balloon machine that makes balloon animal that seems even more complicated
but again almost no cost of goods all like a little rover balloon and you charge three four five bucks for that and you do pretty well yeah it said he said in 2024 he's on track to make 100 grand in revenue I mean that's quite the side hustle obviously we don't know the you know the net
profit or like that my my wife when she was she was on a team growing up and they would fund raise their most successful fundraiser was renting a snow cone machine and then going to a local market and selling snow cones to the local crowd and then they would pay obviously for the
rental for the snow cone but they would make they would make thousand in one day selling snow cones even after the rental and the cost of goods sold yeah yeah selling frozen water and sugar syrup is a pretty good margins and that too so this is a good idea and like he said I mean once
you buy the machine probably some service but if you have a place to store it if you have like a that area you can store it like it's kind of one of these things where it's not costing you money if it's not rented out that weekend yeah there's a there's a novelty factor of like
we'll shoot I've never seen a cotton candy vending machine before so I think that works in his favor and you can kind of get inspiration from this stuff while you're while you're traveling like we've got a trip to Japan coming up next year and it's like vending machine
central there's some stat like you know there's a vending machine for every every person in the country is up but you know remember you wake up the first morning that you're there because of jet lag and it's five in the morning and our son was three months old at the time like all right buddy you
know strap into the early go let's go for a walk and find these like iced coffee vending machines it's like a dollar and you're like yes this is exactly what I need right now this is fantastic but they have vending machines for everything even even at certain restaurants and so you take
them from that as long as you find manufacturing and stuff like if you can bring that to a good location and that's kind of the the key component is you know location location location just like real estate in our vending machine episode we did earluring in the year was 599
with my coughman from from vendingpreneurs and he's he's I said well you know what's going to separate you from the five other guys you know knocking on the door trying to put a vending in this place it's like don't say the v word talk about modern amenities instead of vending
and you know because he's opening it up to you know these like staff lists many many market type of things and you know more than just like your old school vending machine type of stuff but I think you could play well with with cotton candy or balloons or different seasonal events there's
there's much more is the game is much broader than just you know candy bars and and so does I listen to that episode it was really a good episode and it was it was that one felt like it was really you know to some degree you're relying a lot more on how you discuss this concept
with that local that local place whatever it is whether it's you know what we get an all he talked about it in the episode but you know to some degree this one you know you could capitalize on a lot of different things like
you know local events and festivals and parties and you could probably even going back to an idea shared and talked about like you could probably market this to parties in the area you know so you can market it to summer barbecues and and Halloween parties and all these different you know Christmas
parties and things that people throw and how could it be to have like a cotton candy machine as the featured dessert for the night yeah it would almost be like a like a photo booth rental for this wedding for this party or something like that but even better if you can find that evergreen
location that's just going to make you sales all the time but there's an event or a specific play there as well so that's number five on this list number six is when we alluded to earlier where it's like okay we do Christmas light install and takedown but you know that that theme of decorating for
holidays has been creeping earlier and earlier in the year and Halloween has become quite a big thing we're at home depot with my son and they had you know these huge you know animatronic zombies and stuff and then you get a button on the floor and watch him you know raises arms up at you and
makes some noise it's definitely become a thing with the inflatables and everything else to decorate your yard for Halloween in fact we got a little spider web up in the yard now we never had anything like that as kids we have we have jackal anurns on the porch like that was it turn the
light on jackal anurns on the porch you're open for business for trick or treating but like now it's become such such a thing and so this is light up your holidays dot com they started doing Christmas lights 20 years ago in in Chicago now they've expanded to do Halloween as well with
packages starting at eighteen hundred dollars done take many houses to make a meaningful side hustle if your packages start at eighteen hundred dollars they are all about free design right so like there's clearly like you're buying something that's unique this is probably
a little bit differently from what I saw then your classic like hey we'll hang your lights up and I show up you've already got the lights and I just hang them up and I move on which for the record I think that's pretty lucrative too but this is different this is really going for
kind of luxury feel where we're going to give you something totally unique we're going to design something will click here to request your free Halloween designs scheduled your virtual design called see your custom options and pricing and then reserve it so you're exactly right like if
you're already doing if you already have access to a lot of this stuff for a different holiday like Christmas I mean shoot it's such a good idea their website is generic enough that it's probably start off about Christmas lights and I'm sure on November first this entire homepage
is changed over to Christmas right but right now it's all how we've been themed yeah yeah and then we'll shoot we'll take over for you know Valentine's Day and Fourth of July like you know there's I mean if you have enough customers to keep doing it the other one
that I want to point out under this category of holiday to core Halloween decor is porch pumpkins so you got to check out this this woman on Instagram or handle is porch pumpkins 24,000 followers this is Heather Taurus out of Dallas and what she does is she just piles a
bunch of pumpkins on people's porches and that's me being somewhat facetious but you know she makes them look really nice to people they have no design skills is that you're applying that's kind of what it sounds like a million dollars worth of pumpkins in four months out of the
year she's got a whole I think she has a warehouse she's got drivers like there's some logistics involved there's some cost involved but she's found customers doing a million dollars of revenue to put pumpkins on people's porches there is a niche for everything I was really excited when I found
this one I think I love that one when I saw it because that just taps into you know you don't have to stop at the porch you can go and help them decorate the inside of their house you can help them decorate their backyard you can like people they don't have to then buy
and store and piece together a good looking design for their holiday theme in this case Halloween yeah you can just have it all delivered set up aesthetically put together you can do just your porch but I mean I would imagine you could extend it home and you could do every holiday
you know people like to design for the summer and the people like to design for fall in general so there's a boy that's that thing's got a lot of legs to work through yeah I was super impressed it says last year she did 900 jobs ranging between 300 and $2,000 with extra charges that
you want me to take the pumpkins away we'll we'll we'll happy to do it but we'll charge you extra for that it was funny we read trader Joe's with the kids a couple weeks ago in this lady in front of us in line she her entire car at no food only pumpkins and you know
maybe maybe she's the local version of of porch pumpkins of Heather I was just what are you going to do with so many pumpkins but maybe she's doing it as a sign business we'll go go go decorate some people's porches and this is such an interesting I mean we obviously
she's doing that so so much scale but you can start off by just tapping your network and then this would probably also do really well on social media you know TikTok Instagram Instagram posting about this you could probably build up enough of a head of steam
just throughout the year by showing you by showing this process over and over again adding some personality to it like this feels like a business you don't have like SEO skills or necessarily have a you know we talked about like getting your your vending machine placed in certain places I bet you could just rely on your network and social media to really get it off the ground yeah it sounds like it primarily is social driven for her hey I'm going to open up orders in July I'm sold out by
August and now it's just time to go find the pumpkins do the design work set them up I don't know that was crazy so that's probably where she spends most of her time is driving over trying to find all the pumpkins she needs yeah yeah go to the buy out a segment of the pumpkin patch and make sure they got only the good looking ones porch pumpkins that come you can find her over there we've got more Halloween themed side hustles scary good side hustles with Jared coming up
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for details. Alright we're back with Jared from 201 creative and the weekend growth newsletter doing some scary good side hustles and this was a really interesting one that I found it was selling digital clothes and this just blows my mind because my my son is you know the first thing he gets a new game that I want to change my avatar or he was very into like what his character is wearing in whatever game it is if it's if it's Minecraft or it's like
Nintendo switch sports like oh I got this upgraded jacket or like who care like I just want to play the game like it's been so much time on this stuff but there's a huge market around this so this is kieja Watson 22 year old selling road roadblocks clothes and I did not know this was a thing
but she does freelance clothing design for some big brands who want to get their brand into this game like I wear people spend their time there's some time in this game we want to be everywhere we want to get our clothes designs in front of there and so she'd been doing it for years and years selling her own you know designs and clothes you know it's a cool side hustling that it's something that you create once so over and over again like an app or
piece of software or a piece of content but you know two cents per sale it's a volume game until she went out and started to get like freelance design contracts from some bigger brands I think I saw that she made in her first year which is 2023 over $110,000 according to like and it was verified by
by CNBC I suppose and I mean this piggyback stuff when I first saw this story on our on our list your day I thought it was going to be like hey the classic Halloween costume rental place you know like be a little local boutique yeah yeah yeah like a spirit Halloween yeah yeah you know especially
you know to sew or you know you can just like I was thinking of my head how great that idea is even not even you know to sew it's just like go out to all your friends on November 1st I mean like hey can I buy all your old costumes you guys just got done with for like a dollar each off yet and you
can just start building up a whole supply of costumes just by buying all your friends used Halloween costumes the day after Halloween but this puts a whole new spin on I mean this is all digital so it opens up all these avenues and it also kind of highlights you mentioned it like using that skill set of expertise you built up to then go out and get contracts that are outside of that that seems to be where she earned a lot of her money yeah this is an interesting
one it's trying to go you're already part of this ecosystem you're part of this community you know how the game is played you know what's going to play well but then playing that game the way you've been doing it is not going to become a full-time thing it's like you got to go you got to go higher
market you got to go find those corporate clients that that really have budget to to spend in like a in a digital world in this case yeah I think you know this is a good time to mention like with every side hustle you got to understand how scalable it is and how scalable you want it to be and for a
lot of us like we kind of land into a side hustle and then it goes well and then we start thinking about what's next but you don't necessarily think about what's next until you have that first initial success but it's a great example like you said kind of going up market and not getting kind of
confined by just limitations of what she started with yeah the parallel would be you know like stock photography shows up on a bunch of different lists of side hustles but the people who haven't success doing it have thousands hundreds of thousands of images and okay we're going to play this
volume game and it can work like it's passive once those things sell but the near-term thing is like why don't I go do portraits wedding senior photos family photos you know corporate events and charge three four five hundred you know up to several thousand dollars for that event and so it's kind of a similar play here where it's like yeah I can make these things and they'll sell and I can build up my portfolio but I got to go find the corporate client and I'm
thinking because some people have approached like could we you know license your side hustle curriculum or could you create a side hustle curriculum like who's the bigger who's the bigger fish that already would be interested in what you know and that's something that's kind of been on my mind lately where it's like okay you could sell you know onesy twosies or you could go license this to somebody we had a guy who was doing book a book summary
service that was his side hustle and yeah you could sell it you could go to the website and buy it but like for him it was like we're gonna go to Zappos we're gonna go to these companies that have proven to make investments in employee learning like continuing education like they you know care about the stuff like as a benefit of working here you also get access to these you know to this book summary service it's like oh that's a that was a great pitch this reminds me
in equal parts like to to your point this reminds me of a story that I heard a while back about a friend of a friend so I don't know them but they kind of built something that kind of reminds me of this for the Minecraft community and then you know cop popularity they weren't making a ton of money off there's just truly like a little side hustle more of a passion project than anything but years later landed a job at Minecraft as a result of getting on their radar
and one thing leads led to another and so they ended up yes they didn't have a side hustle anymore now they had a job but they were doing a job in an industry they absolutely loved and was built on the fact that they built a side hustle on it yeah there's there's some cool stuff you can do in in Minecraft I think some friends of ours bought Disneyland basically a Minecraft version of Disneyland where they've recreated the entire park all the rides and you know I'm probably
paid five bucks for it or something but if this guy sells Disneyland a thousand of people and it was kind of a cool something he probably wanted to create anyway you know it's like if you can find that kind of space to play and I think you're you're gonna have some fun I agree especially if you already are in that space anyways I mean shoot what's the downside all right next one is one that has come across my desk a few times this year and I know nothing about gambling
or sports betting now he's like what are these numbers mean like the plus 120 or the mind I don't know I had to ask my friends this weekend like what does it mean when it says like plus 1300 something but the side hustle let's come across my desk is arbitrage sports betting yeah are you you bet on football games or anything nope not at all all right so this this will be a great segment to complete rookies so my understanding of this is different sports books are going to have different
odds on different games and the arbitrage opportunity is to find one where this sports book says you know the Yankees are gonna win and this sports book says the Yankees are gonna lose and you find the so but you make two bets and you know you know you're gonna lose one but you know you're also gonna win one and that cancels out the loss and you make a little bit of margin on it like you sound tedious sounds impossible to do without software and that's why there's a bunch of
software like you know I don't want to plug any of them and can't can't speak for them but there's a bunch of software is that'll help you do this you just have to have accounts at every every different sports book imaginable and I don't know how frowned upon this is if this is like just a known thing that happens like I guess they're taking their cut or their fees are they probably don't care but it's an interesting one I mean if you're like a data nerd a math nerd maybe
this is something to look into obviously sports band has grown quite a bit I was reading here I think it was into the 18 kind of opened up a lot more legalization I think I saw a stat here again 35% of Americans are betting on sports now so you know growing market growing that sort of thing I think you described it pretty well I've not I've never been on a sporting event I can think of my entire life but from I am a math nerd like I did kind of major basically in college and
math and so that the process does kind of makes sense you know you're kind of arbitraging different sports betting books and the way that they set lines and the way these things can change dynamically you know these these numbers can change like lead up to a game or one sports book like somebody gets injured and one sports book looks at that differently than another one right and so yeah they have an all updated in real time like there's some lag and that's
kind of my understanding is like yep or you get inside information that this guy is injured and you know before the sports book finds out or so there's a lot of stuff there where like I can see out there would be arbitrage opportunities every weekend every week on different sporting events to paint on where you land in terms of the way your mind works and in terms of how interested you are to kind of get involved in that yeah I was really surprised when we were
watching football last weekend you know there was a lot of gambling related commercial and the first one was like you know when you have a hunch you want to be able to place that bet like right now I thought it was a joke after so they're like seriously promoting fendule or whatever you know what
what it was kind of surprising I guess this is this is a big deal and if you are going to do it maybe there's some arbitrage opportunity the thing with any arbitrage opportunity is like it's usually short lived as usually kind of a narrow a narrow window but there's got to be some people making this work might as well be 21 right where you know blackjack and then learning to if you're smart enough at a time like you said it's a short lived because they've
caught on to that now and casinos don't allow you to to kind of get that advantage but they were able to count cars and then use their brilliance to work the system and that's basically like a form of arbitrage right so you know to some degree that loophole has been closed now but but perhaps this
one still rains supreme yeah I love me a underdog taking down the casino story I will read those I will watch those all day long I don't think anybody is reading for the casino in that movie yeah and maybe since this is all online
like you just you don't have the you know back room brass knuckles type of risk you know if you they find out you're an advantage player I don't know we'll throw that out there not not Halloween related at all but just something that I thought was interesting that's come across it's the first
time I've heard about this approach to it I think it's a very interesting approach again because my mathematical background I like the idea behind it yeah if there's ever risk-free profit like that that lane tends to get crowded right away there's probably risks associated risks in anything but
it didn't last forever so it's got to be one of these you know get in while the kittens good all right what's what's next on this list well you know kind of we've talked about topics like this already at this point this one is a
bicycle ice cream business it's Catherine O'Brien and she's the owner of cream cruiser now this one is a little bit of a different twist to it so hang with it here what she did is yes she created a like an ice cream bike business where she's gonna I think she said she started local farmers markets
she got into weddings corporate events college events she just has a bike I don't know she actually just straight up rode the bike to it or she took it on a truck and it was more of a gimmick but it's got ice cream in the back of the ice cream sandwiches and all that I think she's making like 10 grand a month or something she was saying but what she then did and this is what's kind of fast and we haven't had this yet is that she didn't want to make it basically
bike business university and that's at bikebusinessuniversity.com and that is basically like teaching people how to start these businesses right and so this is a tried and true model and she makes $20,000 per month passive from what it sounds like and she said something about doubling by the start of summer 2024 at last update got a lot of followers on Instagram 82,000 followers ice cream bike lady so she's made a business a side hustle business out of a service
but then she's also made a bigger side hustle business out of teaching people how to do that service. The side hustles on side hustles one thing leads to the next there's somebody doing this in our neighborhood and I get you know very seasonal. I think she's in Baltimore you know it's going to be equally seasonal
there. Yeah but we always are calculated you see the guy comes by you know once a week after school when the weather's good you see him pop by the you know swim meets when the community swim meets are going on and he just kind of has this
wrap and we're always like what kind of you know the calculation. How many do you think he sells a day you know what kind of go very low overhead means got a bike with like a cooler attached to it sure there's a custom build out on there but pretty impressive that she's able to do that and and again going after the the bigger ticket you know weddings corporate events rather than just you know onesy Tuesday ice cream sales I think is an interesting play on that
too and then the age old playbook do the thing get the result and then obviously it's you know kind of a I think it's sold as being like a fun outdoorsy money making business and it's like yeah I attracted 80,000 followers for other
people who want to learn how to do this so Catherine's doing really well. I miss spoke I said $10,000 as much she's I look back because I was looking to see my point was going to be like the overhead is so low like even the startup costs like yeah you think about the classic ice cream you know vendor and they got to buy that big truck and you got to maintain this truck it always looks like it's about to break down and never start again you know and all that but this is
so much easier like the the investment she said she invested under $10,000 to get it going so I was a $10,000 reference but I mean to your point like I think there's so much versatility here like probably driving around selling you know in neighborhoods is not as profitable is getting that wedding gig that corporate gig you know the summer fair whatever it is that's probably where you know you can make a substantial amount of money it is a bit seasonal so I do go back
to that season only thing like in Baltimore in the winter I'm wondering how much bike riding she's doing selling ice cream cones but certainly a good spring summer maybe early fall thing. Yeah it turns into the hot chocolate bike vendor the you know the hot coffee bike vendor. Turn it flip it flip it on its head. Oh here it is okay 100 a hundred grand in five months out of the year with 75% profit margins. What else could you sell out of the back of a bike?
I think this is you know kind of it you know first it was food trucks and it's like well even that's too much overhead right like how do we shrink this down even even further so pretty cool. Yeah I think it's great especially again like I'm thinking about where I live you know I live about 45 minutes out of San Diego but tons of tourists come here in the summer right so I mean you just ride that up and down the boardwalk I don't even know if you have to have a permit right up
and down all day. I think you could probably make a killing. Yeah these are the little the little ideas that I absolutely love because it's like doesn't cost you anything to get it started and then hopefully I mean do your do do diligence on what kind of regulations and requirements you're going to have to you know to be a food vendor but pretty quick to get off the ground and you know
sell an ice cream on a hot day is a pretty easy sell so doing good. The last one is last number 10 is I don't know how real this is this is a real life wedding crash or there's been written up in a few different sources one one reason one
was in the New York Post this is Ernesto Ray Nare's Vareya he lives in Spain and he is a professional wedding crash for a base fee of 500 euros roughly $550 or nest Ernesto says he's gonna I'm gonna come and I will crash your wedding I'm gonna pretend to be the bride's long lost lover and you know
run away with her and I guess the primary target the target audience is the bride who's got cold feet and like wants to break it off in a really dramatic way like at the altar that she was really interesting but Ernesto says he's
booked up through December. When I first saw this I really thought this was going to be an ode to what when you say like wedding crash was like hiring someone to be like the life of the party right like if you want your way to be awesome hire someone who like super outgoing super funny super loud and will show up and like dance the night away and get the party going right I didn't expect it to be somebody who'd show up and crash your wedding in with the intent to break it
up and so yeah details in here feels pretty legit but I was like there's no way but he's as he's booked up and he'll basically show up and like for a cool 500 euro you can just kind of guess if that's the way you want to go about that has solving your wedding cold feet like I guess that's a thing and this is proof that you don't you only need a certain number of clients you don't need to sell to the entire world yeah there's there's a market for anything and
we we talked to Jen Glance from rides maids for hire is this a real thing and she's like yeah you know people will hire me to be there made of honor to help you know kind of be a shoulder to cry on to be be a friend for them on this day and she built a really interesting business around that so
the part that was like got me was like is this for real was at the end of the article he says I get paid extra if I get hit like if the groom or the groomsman are like punching you're slapping me on my way out you know I get 50 euros for every extra hit so like obviously I don't want to get hurt but I kind of want to take my time to because that's why I think my money is this for real I mean I would I would think maybe he put that in there just as a job hazard
you know it's like true if I have to go to the hospital to get you know stitches like that takes away from my 500 euro iron so I've got to upcharge every time I get hit and then he's like well as long as I can play that card properly like don't end up in the hospital maybe put away a couple hundred more euro on the way out you know yeah I was a wedding photographer my first career I did that for a decade and so I have definitely seen the other side of that which is people showed up at weddings
and we actually proved it one time by shot a wedding on a Friday night and then my business partner shot a wedding on a Saturday night and we were editing the weddings the next week and we saw the exact same person in the exact same outfit at one wedding and the next wedding
we actually went and asked the bride and groom when we saw them next I'd you know that person like no I don't know that person I thought those mean my and both of them had the same story like no I didn't know that person same venues in town so there are definitely people who who
crash weddings I didn't know anybody was hired to crash weddings they're there's there for the free food and drinks yeah yeah I think so the social aspect I mean there's some nice weddings out there but but to do it professionally that is next level I will tell you that is next level yeah
there's there's a niche for everything there's a side hustle for everything Jared this has been awesome these are 10 scary good loosely Halloween related some more than others and appreciate you hanging out and and sharing this with us so you got the agency you got 201 creative.com
your host and the niche pursuits podcasts you got the weekend growth newsletter at weekendgrowth.com slash newsletter you've got the Amazon influencer business you got a lot of stuff going on a man of many online side hustles what's what's got you excited these days I do I do yeah the the
the market agency's my day job that's what I do but I I just feel so stimulated and I love doing side hustles I love trying them I love seeing what works I love just getting that inspiration you mentioned it I write about it every week at the newsletter and that's free if people want to just
see what I'm doing what am I working on right now yeah Amazon influencer I've been doing that for about a year and a half now that was really successful out of the gate that one really caught fire and so I share about that all the time and we're coming up into Q4 so that's the fun time
when Amazon influencer how many videos have you made 1250 now I'm actually gonna go make some videos right after this podcast the house is empty my wife and the kids are gone I'm gonna go make some videos right after this podcast so I'm trying to get to about 1350 before the sit the the Black
Friday sale season hits okay it is it just you can't have bought 1300 things off of Amazon like where are you getting the stuff to to film about so yeah we buy probably a good amount on Amazon but we bought nowhere near 1300 but you know first off you can make different types of videos about a
single product maybe you have like several cell phone cases so you can make a video about your cell phone case and you can kind of compare your old cell phone case with your new cell phone case and that's another video right okay you can also get creative and go to neighbor's houses and
film if you go down your neighbor's house you can like sit there you can use your coffee machine for a couple minutes couple you know maybe an hour we have a long takes to to figure it out and then make a video on that I have not done this I've done it once where I was at an Airbnb and I
actually had used a lot of the stuff in the kitchen all week and then I was like oh last day I made a bunch of videos about all the stuff I'd use in that Airbnb but a lot of people will actually make that their model and go out to the Airbnb's and rent them and then film all the products there okay
okay nice so that's how you can get more videos than what you have usually you want to start with at least a base of stuff hopefully you have some stuff but you don't have to have bottom Amazon as long as it's available on Amazon so that's another key factor right do you find that it is
just a factor of creating the content you know and building that library of a thousand plus videos that that's what drives revenue or is there other specific tactics that that go into it honestly no not really not that I figured out I mean it is a side hustle for me so I haven't
liked that there and they don't give you many metrics they don't tell you a lot it's really about you know you're trying to make a good video and make as many of them as you can because I found no correlation to the ones that end up making me most of my money and it is the 80-20 row by the way like almost everything else in life like totally I don't make the same amount off every video I make 80% of my revenue or more off of probably less than 20% of my videos and so it's really just about
taking those swings at the plate to try to figure out which ones you're gonna connect on yeah this is um we started doing some of the kids like Lego videos and trying to make them you know their first passive income on the internet is like given that I remember giving them that 20 bucks like
over a Christmas season last year and there'd be like cool like pause right there you just made passive income on the internet I don't think you have an appreciation for like how cool this is you know and how easy this was for you so I will I will back you up that the influencer program is
probably the easiest money that I've ever made online have uploaded very very few this year and I'm looking at six hundred sixty nine bucks so far this year and I probably have less than 50 videos live so it's um it it works it's legit it's um it's a really cool really cool program that they've got like anything does it stay easy forever does it last forever probably not but if you if you can get accepted into it they still have it said like what level of social following you need they just
make sure you apply with your youtube or instagram or so you they want some link to a social platform even though you don't have to post any of your videos on that social platform correct yeah and it's also based on engagement so it's like this combination of how many followers you have
but they want to see accounts that actually get some engagement but a lot of us have in uh Instagram accounts that have you know over a thousand followers just from friends and family and work colleagues over the years and you know so you can flip that into a business account
it doesn't really change the outward you know account itself and a lot of people will have success with with something like that or maybe a tick-tunk account they started so it's worth applying it's definitely worth applying very good well checking out 201 creative.com John Dykeshtra gave you a
plug last month so appreciate that and we can growth.com slash newsletter to stay in touch with everything that Jared has got going on if you like this episode I know you get a kick out of our annual thanksgiving series of creative side hustles I think there's a Spotify playlist for that if
not I'm happy to make one and link that up in the show notes this coming this coming thanks giving I think will be our seventh annual on that 10 creative side hustles like the most interesting stuff that uh that have come across over the course of the year now that's kind of the shotgun
approach um so if you're looking for something a little more curated what you do is go to hustle.show the answer a few short multiple choice questions and it'll build you a personalized playlist of eight to ten recommended episodes based on your answers again hustle.show for that big thanks to
Jared for sharing his insight big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone you can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show that is it
for me thank you so much for tuning in if you're finding value in the show the greatest compliment is to share with a friend so fire off that text message to somebody who loves creative business ideas somebody who loves Halloween and making money there's gotta be somebody on that venn diagram of yours so uh appreciate you sharing that until next time let's go out there and make something better than happen and i'll catch you in the next edition of this side hustle show hustle on