624: The 10 Most Profitable Side Hustles

26:03I mean, we work with lots of different items. Okay. Yeah. Frames, bases. is. So yeah, we started out with just our garage, which was a huge benefit for us because we didn't have to invest in a unit or anything like that. Around a year-ish, we started talking, we should invest in a unit so we can hold more inventory. Okay. I'm just thinking through the big bulky items, like having a vehicle to be able to transport it, having the space to be able to store it while you're waiting for it to resell. Some things to consider here. Definitely. Yes. How is ShareTown tracking this stuff? Or what happens if you have something that just isn't moving that you can't resell and now you're stuck with this inventory that you didn't have to pay for upfront, but ultimately, is there a bill that comes due?

26:48So there's not. You won't ever pay for an item until you've sold it. And we've been doing it for almost three years and we've sold through every item we've received. I mean, I had those same concerns and questions. You'll see some brands, Like we have a waiting list where when we get a brand, I just text or send out a message and say, hey, we just got this in. Did you find what you were looking for? Were you still wanting it? And it sold in a matter of seconds. And then there are some brands that aren't as well known and popular that we kind of hang on to for a little bit longer. But everything has always sold.

27:24Again, that was Stacey from episode 501. If you want to learn a bit more, I'll also link up our full Sharetown review and write up in the show notes for this episode. If you've got a truck or a bigger SUV and want to give it a shot in your area, be sure to hit up my referral link, sidehustlenation.com slash share town to fast track your application. Now, number five on this list is niche consulting. And the reason it's so profitable is there's essentially no overhead at all. You're just selling your own time and expertise. We've heard from examples like Bradley Rice on his$200 ,000 plus per year income working 18 hours a week.

27:59it's still trading time for money. But if you can trade time for a lot of money, that's a trade that might make sense to make, depending on your goals, right? So some of the highest paid consulting niches are those that piggyback on a popular software tool like Bradley does with Salesforce. Conversion copywriters can command really premium rates. We're talking lawyer money in some cases. I mean, Liz Wilcox was on the show talking about landing a$20 ,000 copywriting project. It's no joke. Some companies spend a ton of money on this stuff and it doesn't have to be a business niche either. I want to point that out.

28:33We heard from Jane Havens who was earning 10 grand a month as a baby and toddler sleep consultant where there is pain and uncertainty and a problem to be solved. There's a business idea there. I can link up that episode in the show notes as well. It was 490 I want to say. One of the interesting recent examples was Carter Osborne in episode 601. Carter started out as an academic tutor, but found that market pretty crowded, pretty saturated. So he niched down to offer a college admissions essay consulting service. Yes, this is a thing. And by being so specialized, he was able to build a full-time income from it on the side from his day job.

29:15My flat rate right now is$2.25 an hour. I think for the Seattle area, for full suite college application consultants, that's a little bit on the low end. specialists tend to charge a little less than those full suite consultants just because we don't offer as many services. So it's a little bit on the low end, mainly because I'm trying to scale up. But the pricing question comes up a lot. And I think in the interest of kind of sharing with listeners some of the missteps that I took early on that hopefully they can avoid, when I started out in this industry, I priced myself really, really low. I priced myself at$75 an hour.

29:45And at the time, as a graduate student, that felt luxurious. I didn't really do a full market research to understand that in the world of college admissions, that's not only cheap, that's sort of suspiciously cheap. That's like, what's wrong with this guy that he's not charging 175. And actually, I would not be surprised if a couple people saw my rate and said, Ooh, I don't know if I really trust this. I'm going to move on. It's like looking for the Groupon for skydiving. You're like, I don't know if this is something I necessarily want to discount on. That's exactly right. That's a great comparison.

30:13Yeah. Well, so that's exactly it. But I think my error back then is I remember thinking, okay, what am I worth? You know, as a college admissions or as a college essay consultant, what do I think I'm worth? Well, I don't have any experience. And yes, I took some creative writing classes and I have Stanford on my resume, but I don't know if I'm really fully qualified to charge$200 an hour or something. I think that was my error, right? Because it's not about what you internally think you're worth. It's about what the market can handle, what they're willing to respond to. And that has nothing to do with your own self-worth or positionality or anything.

30:42If I'd done proper market research and thought of it more as I'm an actor in this space and less of what am I worth relative to other people in the field from a sort of inherent emotional standpoint, I think I pretty immediately would have seen you need to start out at over$100 an hour. I would have started higher and it's taken me a little while to scale to 225. I think now I'm in a more comfortable place, but it was an interesting transition early on. I like that note about starting out pricing too low, almost suspiciously low. But again, that's episode 601. and the other thing that stood out from that call was that carter does almost no proactive marketing all it took was one strategic partnership another admissions consultant in this case who didn't like doing the essay work who started sending referrals his way and the reason i bring that up is you might be closer than you think i love geeking out on all the latest and greatest marketing strategies but to get off the ground you might not need to do much of that at all so that's number five a high value niche consulting service, which can be a super profitable side hustle.

31:42The second half of this list is coming up right after this. All right, we've done our first five most profitable side hustles. And number six is a fun one where your product is almost free, but people will pay a premium for it if it's in the right location. And that's ice vending. Now, the biggest drawback to this business is the machines can be pretty expensive. And depending on your location, It can be pretty seasonal, but the raw margins are pretty enviable. This is Steve Slegel from episode 579 on how the math shakes out in his ice vending business. It costs about eight cents to make 10 pounds of ice, roughly.

32:22Wow. Let's just say you're selling that for$3 if your market supports that price. So now you're at$2.92 of profit. back a little bit out of that for maybe planned maintenance and some of those things. But you're probably going to land in the 240 range per bag. It's pretty tough to beat. And if you can do, let's say, 20, 30, 40 bags a day, you can see those profits start to rack up pretty quickly. And your margin stays the same. It doesn't cost anymore whether you produce 10 pounds of ice or 500 pounds of ice. It's still a kilowatt per hour usage on the power. It's still a certain amount of water coming into the machine.

33:04And it's almost fixed. Now, obviously, the power company is going to raise rates every year because everybody does. But you're still looking at a relatively low, low cost to produce a product that replenishes itself. And that's one of the nice things about the Everest machines is you don't have to stock it. It's constantly running and replenishing itself, having an available product that you don't have to go do anything for. As long as the machine's up and running, it's making ice that's ready to sell. And then hopefully you're making money. It would be super seasonal in the Northwest, but a snack and drink vending machine at our local community pool would crush in the summer.

33:44That's on my side hustle wish list to see if we can make that happen. Again,$5.79 on ice vending. And if you want a broader view on vending machines and many employee-less markets in general, check out$5.99 with Mike Hoffman. But ice vending makes our list as number six purely because those unit economics make me smile. Oh, it costs eight cents to make this bag. Number seven is a membership or community business. Now, a lot of people are attracted to a membership model because of the recurring revenue component, which I get it, that is attractive. The most common membership structure that we see from Side Hustle Show guests has two parts, as a content or education component and a community component.

34:24And the common logic there is that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. And yes, it takes time and energy to foster and support that community and potentially to feed more content into the membership, but it's a model that can naturally scale pretty well. If you've got 100 members at$100 a month, you're at$10 ,000 a month. And you've got some levers to play with there too on growth, on pricing, on retention, on add-on offers where it can be really profitable. So that's the common membership model that we see, content plus community. But I wanted to share a different example from years ago on the show, and that's Jack Spirko's member support brigade, I think he called it.

35:05Jack's been hosting the Survival podcast probably 15 years at this point, maybe longer. And when we spoke, the biggest piece of his revenue pie was from this unique membership model where it wasn't about getting extra content or exclusive content. It wasn't necessarily about access to a forum or community, but it was about getting exclusive annual access to a bunch of deals and discounts that Jack had negotiated for his followers. Here's how he explained it way back on episode 319. So the way it works is a listener will sign up 50 bucks a year. Sometimes I run sales. Sometimes I run a lifetime sale.

35:42So I do that a couple of times, usually really once a year. Like today I did that and we did$4 ,500 worth of sales in an hour. That was a nice little bonus that we paid ourselves for Christmas. So that listener signs up for whatever duration and they're on an automatic renewal because that's just smart from a business standpoint. Of course, they can cancel anytime they want. And they get a login to the private side of the site. They log into there. And the big value add, again, is we call it the benefits section. They click on benefits. And there's about 70 companies that offer discounts. Imagine if the AAA discounts that AAA says they give you were actually discounts, right?

36:20The stuff you actually use. That's kind of what our program is. We have discounts on firearms, parts, and components. We have discounts on seeds. We have discounts on plants. We have a couple that are kind of like general store of prepping type that have everything and anything you think of. water filters. Berkey water filters are probably the premier water filter in the prepper space. We have a discount on those. So we have discounts on all these different products. And some of them are not really even prepper products. We have one on a company called EcoSense. And I'm like, people will dig that for their, they don't justify to their wives why they have this program.

36:51That works. We have one called Olive Basket, those infused olive oils and vinegars. So cooking products, et cetera. So any company thinks they're a good fit, we'll look at them. And if they are, will say, okay, write your own blurb. If you do a membership program and you do discounts, I really encourage you to come up with guidance like word count, whatever. Make the customer write their own blurb. That way, if anybody doesn't understand something, it's their fault, not yours. You'll change it. You see what I'm saying? Otherwise, like he crafted for them and the customer gets the wrong idea about what the discount means.

37:21So you make the write their own blurb. We drop them in there. And I shoot to add about six to 12 new partner companies a year. and some of them are small businesses. So you'll have some turnover if you do this. Either they'll stop doing it or the guy will go off and do something else or discontinue the only product he had discounted. My requirement is one, I don't do a contract, but I expect kind of a virtual handshake. We agree to do this together for a year. So there's stability in my program. If it really doesn't work for you, I'll shut it off. But we go in with kind of the understanding that's the goal and that the discount not be something you do all the time for everybody anyway.

37:56It has to be something that's exclusive doesn't mean you can't do it around the holidays or twice a year or something, but my people get access to it 24-7. And as long as they're willing to do that, it's an quality product, and I trust the company, I'll bring them on board. And that makes the sale easy because if the customer who listens to you every day looks at the people doing the discounts and says, well, I buy from them already, and I don't buy from them, but I buy that product, and I'm happy to buy from them since they support us, and I use herbal supplements, and I use this, and I do the math in my head and I'm going to get$70 in discounts to give this guy$50, who I like anyway.

38:35Well, done. And as long as they're making a profit, they retain. I've had customers that are eight years retained because if you had something that's giving you$100 worth of discounts you're paying$50 for, you have poor financial sense if you cancel that product. Yeah, I like this a lot, actually. This is kind of a digital coupon book in a way. I think in Seattle, we used to have like the entertainment book or something we used to get when we were a kid. It's like a digital coupon book or even a Costco membership. Yeah, we're definitely going to get more than 50 bucks out of this. So it's a no brainer.

39:07I really like that. Is the pitch just on air? Hey, join the support brigade for 50 bucks a year and get access to all these exclusive deals. And as you might imagine, this model scales really well. The incremental cost of a new member is essentially zero and Jack keeps the whole operation really lean? It's me and my wife and my dogs and the ducks. That's really the team here, right? So the dog sits on the floor while I podcast and warns my feet up. My wife does all my booking for me when a guest submits a form. She takes it from there. Wednesday morning, like magic, a form shows up on my desk.

39:44I research the guest. And by the time we're doing the interview at one o 'clock, I know enough about him to do the show intelligently. We stay very, very lean on it. So we have no cost. Our costs are all web hosting and anything else I can convince the government is related to the show. Meals out or taking a vacation or something like that. There's nobody to pay. What's your margin on a membership? I don't know. The biggest expense is the buck 40 that PayPal or Stripe charges me to run the charge. There is a cost to deliver that, but the cost is the same for 1 ,000 members as it is for 10 ,000.

40:21Could you set up something similar in your niche? I thought it was a pretty creative example of creating value for all parties while building a really profitable business as well. That's number seven, a membership business. Number eight is another opportunity for recurring revenue, and that's product licensing. This is where you come up with a product idea. Usually it's some iteration or evolution on something that's already existing, that's already out in the market. And then you pitch it to bigger companies, companies with the production and distribution and marketing firepower to really bring it to life rather than you trying to find a manufacturer to drum up support for a Kickstarter campaign to fund the thing and try and get the thing off the ground all on your own.

41:02This is the side hustle that appeals to all the modern day inventors who look at products and think of all the ways they could be better. And companies have a history of doing this and in a lot of cases have a built-in process for accepting submissions from outsiders like you and me. It's their way of crowdsourcing some innovation at a relatively low cost. So what's a typical licensing deal worth? Well, here's Stephen Key from InventRight. He's a resident expert on this business, and he explained it this way. What is a good deal? A good deal is when they're selling a lot of products. That's a good deal.

41:36An average royalty is about 5%. What's really more important is make sure it has minimum guarantees, meaning that they have to sell X amount. If not, you get it back. It's your best protection. What do you mean by that? It's really easy. Most companies are going to want an exclusive. All right, we see your idea. We're going to take it. We're going to spend all our money, but we want an exclusive. So make sure they've got a lot of stores, right? Make sure they're the right partner for you. Okay, so I sent my sell sheet out to five or 10 different companies. Maybe I got a couple of responses. The one person is pretty serious about it.

42:09One company is pretty serious. They say, okay, we want to do this. We want exclusive. deal. They'll say, we want a worldwide exclusive. It's amazing how greedy these guys get, but basically you want them to be greedy. Okay, so great. Now what you're going to do is that you're going to add up all the stores that they're in and you're going to do the math that they're going to sell one a week. If they don't sell one a week, it's going to get kicked to the curb at retail. So now you've done the math. They're in 25 ,000 stores and they're going to sell one a week. So that's, you know, a hundred thousand a month.

42:41Would they tell you how many stores they're expecting distribution in, or you just have to guess? Well, you don't have to guess, just ask them what stores are you in? Okay. So now you realize, well, they're going to sell, you know, a couple million units a year, easy. My royalties on the wholesale price. And so now I've got an estimate of what I'm going to make, right? So now I'm going to give you an exclusive. Now, if I give you an exclusive and I don't have any type of performance clause, I just gave it to you for free. So I have to have some type of minimum that you have to sell. If you don't sell it, maybe get bored with it.

43:16Maybe do a lousy job. Hey, I need to get it back. So you set the minimum guarantees. The first year, very, very low. Second year is a little higher. And then the third year is you hit them between the eyes with it. Make sure they're doing a good job. And this is on, you know, number of unit sales or like money in your pocket? It really comes... The rotating label that I just mentioned, the minimum guarantees were$750 ,000 for me. They had to sell with royalties coming to me. They had to sell that much. So, okay. Now, this is free for you to license to somebody else. Yes. And guess what? They paid for all the patents too.

43:49Oh, okay. So, they paid for 13 patents. They went in a different direction. They gave it all back to me after five years. So, then I licensed it to another company. I've been doing that for 20 years. Oh, okay. It's a fun game. It's really fun. Even when they mess up, it's even fun because then you get it back, find somebody else to take it. It's interesting. But what I like about it, you can kind of design your life. See, it's a different mindset. Live where you want to live and work as hard as you want to. It takes time to get started. And like anything else, you have to dive into it, right? There's things to do to be successful.

44:24You have to educate yourself. but the trick is come up with a lot of ideas and submit them to a lot of companies. It's a fascinating side hustle, one with super low risks and big upside potential. If you've ever done a licensing deal, I would love to hear from you. We've done a few of these inventor slash entrepreneur type of examples on the show who've gone down this path. One was a Pictionary-inspired card game that got licensed to Mattel. One was like a drink koozie with a frozen bulbousy section on the bottom that would fit into the little dimple underneath an aluminum can. And one I want to say was a pad you could wear under a baseball or softball glove to protect your hand from hard line drives or throws.

45:07But it's been a while. We'd love to hear some new case studies. That's number eight, product licensing. Let me know what you got. Low risk, big upside potential, very profitable side hustle. Number nine is reselling software. And I wanted to include software on this list because as you know, software companies are some of the most profitable in the world, right? Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe. And while it's definitely possible for side hustlers to develop your own app, your own software tool, especially now with the help of no code tools, with the help of chat GPT, even hiring developers, it's still a more intimidating process for a lot of people.

45:42The episodes that we've done or did on building software just didn't perform that well. But there was an episode we did on reselling software or white labeling someone else's software that did really well because it comes with a lot of the benefits of a software business like recurring revenue, low overhead, without the upfront development cost or product market fit risks. Now, in this case, the game plan is to find a tool that you like and you play matchmaker between companies who could benefit from it. The example we used in episode 494 with Chris Lillini was a reputation management software that helped small businesses collect more positive reviews from their customers.

46:23So they'd end up ranking better in Yelp, ranking better in Google and getting more business. Here's Chris on how the model works. So for example, if I go to the reputation management software in here, I imagine, I don't know if it's one of these that you're using, but there's a handful of options there. Yeah, I'm sure. They're charging you a set price per month per customer, and then you're turning around and selling it at 97 a month. Are you comfortable sharing like how that math works or how you approach those margins? Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, my lowest package is 97 bucks a month. I mean, that's, that's kind of a mom and pop shop.

47:01Who's like, you know, uh, we don't use any other software. Like you're the first software we use otherwise, you know, and they're like, but you know, we do get phone numbers and name and emails occasionally. Right. So they're like manually typing it in. Right. I would say that more so I'm at least at 150 bucks a month. most times i would say what i'm selling more of now is about 300 bucks a month and that's just because there's you know different components to the technology now that's making it more of like a an all-in-one sort of solution for people and so uh how does the math work out well first off usually what it works is you have to buy a kind of and this is just my own experience you've you have to buy a minimum of so many seats that number of seats is usually like you know you got to buy 10 seats at 40 bucks a seat, right?

47:47And then usually there's discounts as you go beyond that, because they want to incentivize you obviously to grow your agency and allow you more and more profit margin, right? But your markup is really whatever you can charge, you know, whatever the perceived value is to the client, right? So for me, if it's a client where I'm kind of like, well, I don't know if I necessarily want to do a lot for this person. And there's maybe not as much marketing budget, then maybe it's a 97 bucks a month. But if I'll just give you an example, I just recently signed up an ENT doc out of Houston, and they'd been kind of struggling for years to get more reviews.

48:20And within their first 30 days, they got 34 five-star reviews. And they were like, this thing is incredible. I don't know what you're doing or how you're doing it, right? That's a lot of value, especially when a sinus surgery can cost 10, 15 grand. It's like a roofer, right? Kind of thing. But they're actually doing volume to justify that stuff. So yeah, it's based off of the seats. And the more that you do, the cheaper that they are. I mean, sometimes people will do, you know, hey, for 300 bucks a month, it's unlimited. I mean, that's really where I started. And then, you know, what I would say, Nick, you know, if I was going to have a word to the wise of somebody doing something like this is I would make sure that you focus on building relationships with your clients, them understanding that you have a certain level of expertise enough that they trust you that, you know, let's say that the platform you're using gets sunsetted because somebody else buys them because that's what's happening out there, right, is a lot of these little things are being consolidated on these bigger brands.

49:15It's just the nature of the beast out there. And so, you know, that was a lesson that I learned maybe midway through my sort of business where my initial software got bought up by a bigger company. And I mean, let's just say there's a lot of sleepless nights there. And it was just because I hadn't necessarily prepared or positioned myself in a way that, hey, this is a newer platform that we're moving to and it would be super awesome and it's going to be way better, more efficient, then people would be like, oh yeah, I'm totally on board. Whatever you think, Chris, you've been doing right by us for years.

49:46I would just make sure that you're keeping and maintaining that relationship and that capacity. And if not you, your account managers. Just so they don't just one day log in and see that the interface is all changed and they say, what's going on? It just creates questions for you? Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, what happened? Or what is this? Or I can't log in, right? Because there's got to be a transition period of moving to that new one and learning the ropes of the new software and stuff like that. So yeah, that would be my only emphasis. And I use a couple of softwares that I provide for my clients just based on what their needs are.

50:23And so I guess in a way, I'm somewhat platform agnostic because if something were to happen again, I could move everybody to this platform or I can move everybody to this other platform. Or I know a couple of others that I might explore that are always kind of on the radar potentially if something were to go, you know, weird or screwy, right? Because I would say the biggest thing is I'm moving off that$300 a month unlimited platform. I moved to a platform that was like, okay, that's cool for the first year since we bought these guys. But now we're actually going to charge you 20 bucks per seat.

50:53And I'm like, okay, guys, you realize that my monthly bill for you just went from 300 bucks to about 2 ,400 a month. And I was like, yeah, that would just cripple my agency, Right. But instead, I was able to talk it down to ten dollars a month. Now, I think I was the cheapest one because I had the best relationship with the people and I was able to kind of get through that somewhat unscathed. So, yeah. OK. Yeah. Maintaining those relationships. Everything is negotiable in some way. And when things shift, you know, the customer, you've sold the solution. The customer is kind of convinced that this is a problem at this point and they trust you to provide the solution.

51:29If the back end of that solution needs to change slightly from one provider to another, as long as we're still getting the results, like you said, I think that's still going to be okay versus completely being married to one solution. And then all of a sudden it stops being effective anymore. And then you're kind of in trouble there. What's the conversation like with prospective customers? Because it's like, well, they could go directly to this software and pay$14 a month versus$97 to$300 for you to run it for them. Or I don't know, like what's the value add layer? I don't know. I'm curious. I'm curious.

52:09Like, well, where does the margin come from? So they sell it to us, right? At, you know,$10 or let's just say what's more reasonable, right? $40 a seat, right? Well, their retail pricing at a minimum is$117, right? So that's what they're selling retail because they realize their cost for client acquisition or customer acquisition is X, right? That they're putting a lot of money on that side, right? A lot of these guys will do contracts. So when you sign with them, and this is how really, to be honest with you, as a solopreneur, a side hustle solopreneur, whatever you want to call yourself, where you can create value that makes your offer more attractive is that I don't do contracts.

52:50Mine's all month to month, right? So nobody feels like they're being pressured. And I always jokingly say in our kind of our sales call, if you will, I said, hey, look, you know, my goal is to make you so delighted with the results that we're providing that you kind of you kind of look at your bill every month and you kind of laugh and you go, I can't believe that's all I pay this guy. Right. That's sort of my approach to it. Right. And I also say at the same time, like, hey, if it's not a good fit and we're not we're not having a good relationship, like let's become friends amicably. Like I don't want to sour the relationship.

53:17I don't want you stuck in a relationship that you don't like. Also, you know, if you're not a good client, I don't want to be in a relationship with you either. Right. kind of thing. And I say jokingly, obviously, but the idea there is like, Hey, this is an open conversation, right? In that realm. And so where the margin is, is in what they retail or charge it for. Right. So I'm always kind of keeping an eye on what that is. The powerful thing is, is that I don't have a lot of bloated overhead, right? I'm not paying for the software development costs, right? That's the thing that really would eat up.

53:43Cause I've, I'd thought back when I was a naive entrepreneur, I was like, well, I'll just build this software myself. And I went out and got it quoted. And I was like, just to get a baseline platform was going to cost me about 300 grand. And that was to like, just get something to stand up. And then I was like, yeah, but then what's the ongoing maintenance to keep that thing relevant, especially in the digital world where like, you know, browsers are changing all the time. All these review platforms are changing all the time. I was like, yeah, you know what the 10 bucks a month I'm spending per account seems like a fair shake, you know, and I'll just deal with the limitations of the platform.

54:15Super interesting business. Again, that's$4.94 in your archives to learn more about how it all works and how Chris is getting his messaging in front of his target customers. At that time, he reported earning a multi six-figure income from the software reselling business, number nine, on our list of the most profitable side hustles. I want to bring it home with number 10, and it's another example of creating something once and selling it over and over again, and that's self-publishing. My self-publishing experience started in 2012 with a book called Virtual Assistant Assistant, and this was the project that opened my eyes to the power of Amazon as a buy buttons marketplace to put your work up for sale on the world's largest store for a very low cost that people can search for and buy over and over again.

55:01And you're not making a ton on any individual book, but over the years it can definitely add up. I'll share some of those numbers in a second. But it was interesting because I was running the virtual assistant website at the time. My thought always people would come to the website, forgive the less than amazing looking design of the site, see that I'd written a book on the topic and click over to Amazon to buy it to learn more about outsourcing. Instead, the exact opposite happened through the magic of affiliate link tracking. I can see almost no one went through the link on the website to go buy the book, but instead people were searching for virtual assistant information on Amazon.

55:35They found the book and they came over to the website afterwards. But self-publishing is one of my longest running side hustles. I've added several books since then, since 2012, including Work Smarter, which was 2015, Buy Buttons in 2016, The Side Hustle in 2019, which should still be free on Kindle if you're in the US, sidehustlenation.com book. We'll get you over there. 1K 100 Ways in 2021, crowdsourcing a bunch of stories from the Side Hustle Nation community in that one, and then the Three Question Journal in 2023. Now, in total, those books and a few have earned over$84 ,000 in lifetime royalties, which given an estimated maybe two grand in total production costs between editing, cover design, maybe audiobook production, like very, very low production costs.

56:22That's a 97 % margin, right? It's hard to find something with a better profit margin than something like that. Now that doesn't even include audiobook sales, doesn't even include the other benefits of self-publishing, like brand awareness, like building an email list, like increased podcast listenership, all that other good stuff that comes from putting your work out into the world. Now on the show, we've covered a variety of self-publishing related topics, including low content publishing, which would be like journals and notebooks. We covered children's publishing, which is still on the back burner for me.

56:55I need to review the illustrations and hopefully bring that one to market. I think that'll be a fun project. We covered public domain publishing. This was Aaron Kerr in episode 364. He described earning over$100 ,000 in royalties from public domain books. I think his biggest seller was like an Anne of Green Gables collection. But this is basically taking free text where the copyright has expired. The work has entered the public domain, which I want to say is anything older than 95 years in the US. Format it for Kindle. you put it up for sale on Amazon. And I've got to imagine there's a bit of competition of other people doing this.

57:32But it's just another example of tapping into the power of Amazon in a creative way, creating something once that you can sell over and over again and making some side hustle money. So those were my top 10 most profitable side hustles. To recap, it was number one, the recurring web design service inspired by Ryan Golgoski. Number two is to start a content business, something that scales really well, same effort to create that YouTube video that 100 people watch or 100 ,000 people watch can be really powerful that way. Number three was digital products and perhaps even AI assisted digital products.

58:06Number four was ShareTown, any physical product business where you got no upfront inventory cost is interesting to me. Number five was niche consulting. Is there a service that you could offer that you have some subject matter expertise in where you command a high hourly rate or high effective hourly rate? Number six was ice vending just because I love the unit economics on that. Number seven was memberships. We talked both about the content plus community membership, but also the kind of creating a digital Costco where people join for discounts in a specific industry or niche. I thought that was really interesting.

58:39Number eight is product licensing, where you can get paid over and over again from sending an idea off to a particular company and letting them do the heavy lifting. They're really, really interesting, low risk, low overhead, high upside. Number nine was reselling software. We could include software in general, but it's sometimes maybe a little more intimidating or a little more difficult to build a software product from scratch. Instead, one option to resell or white label a software product that already exists. And number 10, self-publishing with those 97 % margins over the last 12 years of doing that.

59:13So that's my list complete with real life examples and some actual margin numbers. Now, for the sake of curiosity, I had to ask, well, chat GPT, what are the most profitable side hustles? And I was really surprised. There is shockingly little overlap here. They did include content creation. They did include freelancing, which I'll give them some credit. I'll bucket my recurring web design service and niche consulting under that umbrella. But I was surprisingly, they included options like ride share and delivery, well documented to be not very profitable. They included stock photography, which is you can make money doing it, but it's like such a volume game.

59:49I got to take thousands of pictures and upload all this stuff. And dog walking was another one on their list. They're all totally viable side hustles. And some of them do have really low overhead, but pretty limited in terms of the hourly rates you can earn. Maybe if you take six dogs at once, then it starts to explode. So moral of the story, as with all things AI, as with all things on the internet in general, take it with a grain of salt, do your own due diligence, find a side hustle you're excited about. Find one that you're excited to take action on. If you're not pumped about it, if you're not excited to explore it, you're never going to prioritize the time and attention it needs.

1:00:21Big thanks to all our past guests who shared their insight to make this episode possible. I will do my best to link up all of those episodes in the show notes for this one so you can easily find those and add them to your device. Or if you want to go a little deeper, you can actually build yourself a personalized Side Hustle Show playlist at hustle.show. Just answer a few short multiple choice questions and we'll recommend a handful of episodes to start with based on your responses. Again, that's hustle.show. Thousands of listeners have already claimed their playlist and I want to invite you to be next.

1:00:56Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Hey, what do you think of these ideas? Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.