638: 10 Scary-Good Side Hustles That Make Real Money

21:39I mean, this guy made it work, I think he said, in the shower one day for the AI baby, you know, go all the way back to the AI baby photo thing, you know? And so 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 and 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 flesh.

22:09Very good. So that was number four, this AI baby generator making$10 ,000 in total revenue before selling for a$10 ,000 plus exit there. What's next for us? This one's fun. We're going to go from AI to a little bit more of a classic idea. And this is the 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 et cetera. But basically, in their first weekend, that story they talked about was$800 in revenue from a machine on a good month. Now, again, they're doing it year round, it seemed like.

22:46So summer, one machine can make anywhere from 6 to 15K in revenue. They have, I think, 10 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 Halloween festivals. We've got 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 Oktoberfest, by the way. And that's usually end of September, early October. So specifically this time of year, like the cotton candy of any machine you could use year round.

23:19But this time of year, there's actually a lot of like fall festivals where these sorts of things would work really well. Yeah, if you could rent it out for an event, because the machines themselves are maybe a couple thousand bucks and you have some material costs going into that. But if he's pulling in 800 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, there's he described there is there is more. I mean, any vending machine has some money. You either got to go restock it or you got to go service it like like in this case.

23:48But 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, shoot, why didn't 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 to somebody else. This is distinctivevending.com if you want to check it out. So he's got the, I think he's got a balloon machine that makes balloon animals.

24:15That seems even more complicated. But again, almost no cost of goods sold like a little rubber balloon. And you charge three, four, five bucks for that and you're doing pretty well. Yeah, he said in 2024, he's on track to make 500 grand in revenue. I mean, that's quite the side hustle. Obviously, we don't know the net profit or anything like that. My wife, when she was on a team growing up and they would fundraise, 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.

24:48But they would make$1 ,000 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 some pretty good margins in that, too. So this is a good idea. And like you said, I mean, once you buy the machine, probably some service. but if you have a place to store it, if you have an area you can store it, 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 novelty factor of like, well, shoot, I've never seen a cotton candy vending machine before. So I think that works in his favor.

25:16And you can kind of get inspiration from this stuff while you're traveling. We've got a trip to Japan coming up next year, and it's like vending machine central. There's some stat, like there's a vending machine for every person in the country. 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 ergo. Let's go for a walk. And you 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.

25:46This is fantastic. But they have vending machines for everything, even at certain restaurants. And so you take inspiration 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, the key component is, you know, location, location, location, just like real estate in our vending machine episode we did earlier in the year was a 599 with Mike Hoffman 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 machine in this place.

26:18And he'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 staffless mini market type of things. And, you know, more than just like your old school vending machine type of stuff. But I think it could play well with cotton candy or balloons or different seasonal events. There's much more. The game is much broader than just, you know, candy bars and sodas. I listened 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, in the episode.

26:59But, 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 we already 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 Halloween parties and all these different Christmas parties and things that people throw. And how cool would it be to have a cotton candy machine as the featured dessert for the night? Yeah, it would almost be like a photo booth rental for this wedding, for this party or something like that.

27:29But even better, if you could 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 one we alluded to earlier, where it's like, we'll do Christmas light install and take down. 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 were 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, raise his arms up at you and make some noise.

28:05It'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 had jack-o'-lanterns on the porch. That was it. Turn the light on, jack-o'-lanterns on the porch. You're open for business for trick-or-treating. But now it's become such a thing. And so this is lightupyourholidays.com. They started doing Christmas lights 20 years ago in Chicago. Now they've expanded to do Halloween as well, with packages starting at$1 ,800. Doesn't take many houses to make a meaningful side hustle if your packages start at$1 ,800.

28:38They are all about free design, right? So there's clearly, you're buying something that's unique. This is probably a little bit different, at least from what I saw, than your classic, like, hey, we'll hang your lights up. And I show up, and 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 that kind of luxury feel where we're going to give you something totally unique. We're going to design something. We'll click here to request your free Halloween design, schedule your virtual design call to see your custom options and pricings, and then reserve it.

29:07So you're exactly right. 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 started off about Christmas lights. And I'm sure on November 1st, this entire homepage gets changed over to Christmas, right? But right now it's all Halloween themed. Yeah. Yeah. And then we'll shoot, we'll take over for Valentine's Day and 4th 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 decor, Halloween decor, is porch pumpkins.

29:41So you got to check out this, this woman on Instagram, her handle is porch pumpkins, 34 ,000 followers. This is Heather Torres 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 that have no design skills. Is that what you're implying? That's kind of what it sounds like to us. 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 costs involved.

30:13But she's found customers doing a million dollars in 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. You can just have it all delivered, set up, aesthetically put together.

30:45You can do just your porch, but, I mean, I would imagine you could extend it in the home, and you could do every holiday. You know, people like to design for the summer, and people like to design for fall in general. So, boy, 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. Hey, you want me to take the pumpkins away? We'll be happy to do it, but we'll charge you extra for that. It was funny. We were at Trader Joe's with the kids a couple of weeks ago and this lady in front of us in line, her entire cart, no food, only pumpkins.

31:18And maybe she's the local version 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 side business. We'll go decorate some people's porches. And this is such an interesting, I mean, obviously she's doing it at 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, TikTok, Instagram, posting about this. You could probably build up enough of a head of steam just throughout the year by showing this process over and over again, adding some personality to it.

31:49This feels like a business. You don't have to have SEO skills or necessarily have a, we talked about getting 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.

32:17Go to the buyout segment of the pumpkin patch and make sure they got only the good looking ones. Porchpumpkins.com. You can find her over there. We've got more Halloween themed side hustles, scary good side hustles with Jared coming up right after this. There are less than 100 days left in 2025, which means less than 100 days left to hit those goals that you said or to refocus your energy on what really matters. If you've got some catching up to do and maybe you've been procrastinating on taking that next step, our sponsor Indeed can help you find the best candidates for the role you need to fill and find them fast.

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34:38speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees extra see mint mobile for details all right 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 I want to change my avatar. Or he was very into like what his character is wearing in, you know, 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 cares?

35:18Like, 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 Kiesha Watson, 22 year old selling Roblox 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, hey, where are people spending their time? They're spending some time in this game. We want to be everywhere. We want to get our clothes and 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 hustle in that it's something that you create once, sell over and over again, like an app or a piece of software or a piece of content.

35:55But, you know, two cents per sale, It was definitely a volume game until she went out and started to get 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— It was verified by CNBC, I suppose. And this piggybacks off, when I first saw this story on our list here today, I thought it was going to be like, hey, the classic Halloween costume rental place. Be a little local boutique. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a spirit Halloween, yeah. Yeah, especially if you know how to sew. I was thinking in my head how great that idea is.

36:32Not even if you know how to sew, it's just like go out to all your friends on November 1st and be like, hey, can I buy all your old costumes you guys just got done with for like a dollar each off you? 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 it. 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 that expertise you built up to then go out and get contracts that are outside of that.

36:57That 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've got to go higher market. You got to go find those corporate clients that really have budget to spend in a digital world, in this case. Yeah, I think this is a good time to mention, with every side hustle, you got to understand how scalable it is and how scalable you want it to be.

37:30And for a lot of us, 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 of, like you said, kind of going upmarket 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 have 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.

38:00But the near term thing is like, why don't I go do portraits, weddings, senior photos, family photos, corporate events, and charge three, four, 500, 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've been 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?

38:33And that's something that's kind of been on my mind lately where it's like, OK, you could sell, you know, onesie twosies or you could go license this to somebody. We had a guy who was doing 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 for him, it was like, we're going to go to Zappos. We're going to go to these companies that have proven to make investments in employee learning, like continuing education. They care about this stuff. As a benefit of working here, you also get access to this book summary service. I was like, oh, that was a great pitch.

39:07This reminds me in equal parts, 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, caught popularity. They weren't making a ton of money off. There was 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 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.

39:39Yeah, there's some cool stuff you can do. 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, probably paid five bucks for it or something. But if this guy sells Disneyland to thousands 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 in, I think you're going to have some fun. I agree. Especially if you already are in that space anyways. I mean, shoot, what's the downside?

40:10All 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, it's like, what do these numbers mean? Like the plus 120 or the minus? I don't know. I had to ask my friends this weekend. Like, what does it mean when it says like plus 1300 or something? But the side hustle that's come across my desk is arbitrage sports betting. And you bet on football games or anything? Nope, not at all. All right. So 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.

40:43And the arbitrage opportunity is to find one where this sports book says, you know, the Yankees are going to win. And this sports book says the Yankees are going to lose. And you find the so you make two bets and you know, you know, you're going to lose one, but you know, you're also going to win one. And that cancels out the loss and you make a little bit of margin on it. It sounds tedious, sounds impossible to do without software. And that's why there's a bunch of software. I don't want to plug any of them. I can't speak for them. But there's a bunch of software that will help you do this. You just have to have accounts at every different sportsbook imaginable.

41:18And I don't know how frowned upon this is, if this is just a known thing that happens. I guess they're taking their cut or their fees. They probably don't care. But it's an interesting one. I mean, if you're a data nerd, a math nerd, maybe this is something to look into. Obviously, sports betting has grown quite a bit. I was reading here, I think it was in 2018, 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 never bet on a sporting event that I can think of in my entire life.

41:53But I am a math nerd. Like I did kind of major basically in college and math. And so the process does kind of make sense. You're kind of arbitraging different sports betting books and the way that they set lines and the way these things can change dynamically. These numbers can change like leading up to a game or one sports book. Somebody gets injured and one sports book looks at that differently than another one, right? Yeah, or they haven't all updated in real time. There's some lag. And that's kind of my understanding. Yep, or you get inside information that this guy's injured and you know before the sports book finds out.

42:25So there's a lot of stuff there where I can see how there would be arbitrage opportunities every weekend, every week on different sporting events, depending on where you land in terms of the way your mind works and in terms of how interested you are in getting involved in that. Yeah, I was really surprised when we were watching football last weekend. There was a lot of gambling-related commercials. And the first one was like, you know when you have a hunch, you want to be able to place that bet right now. I thought it was a joke. effort. They're like, oh, no, they're like seriously promoting FanDuel or whatever.

42:56You know what it was. It was kind of surprising. It's like, oh, 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. It's usually kind of a narrow, a narrow window. But there's got to be some people making this work. Reminds me of the movie 21, right, where, you know, Blackjack and learning to if you're smart enough at a time, like you said, which is short-lived because they've caught on to that now and casinos don't allow you to get that advantage. But they were able to count cards and then use their brilliance to work the system and that's basically like a form of arbitrage, right?

43:33So to some degree that loophole has been closed now, but perhaps this one still reigns supreme. Yeah, I love me an underdog taking down the casino story. I will read those. I will watch those all day long. I don't think anybody was rooting for the casino in that movie. Yeah. And maybe since this is all online, like you're just you don't have the, you know, backroom brass knuckles type of risk. You know, if 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 I thought was interesting that's come across. It's the first time I've heard about this approach to it.

44:07I think it's a very interesting approach, again, because of 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 doesn't last forever. So it's got to be one of these, you know, get in while the getting's good. All right. What's, uh, 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, uh, a bicycle ice cream business. It's Catherine O 'Brien and she's the owner and the founder of cream cruiser.

44:36Now this one has 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 going I think she said she started at local farmer's markets. She got into weddings, corporate events, college events. She just has a bike. I don't know if she actually just straight up rode the bike to it or if she took it on a truck and it was more of a gimmick. But it's got ice cream in the back of it, you know, ice cream sandwiches and all that. I think she was making like 10 grand a month or something she was saying. But what she then did, and this is what's kind of fascinating, we haven't had this yet, is that she then went on to make basically Bike Business University.

45:07And 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. She's 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.

45:38There's somebody doing this in our neighborhood. And again, you know, very seasonal. I think she's in Baltimore. You know, it's going to be equally seasonal there. But we always are calculating. 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 rap. And we're always like, what kind of, you know, the calculations? How many do you think he sells a day? You know, what kind of go very low overhead? I mean, he's got a bike with like a cooler attached to it.

46:07I'm 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 bigger ticket, you know, weddings, corporate events, rather than just, you know, onesie, twosie 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 of people who want to learn how to do this. So Catherine's doing really well.

46:38I misspoke, by the way. I said$10 ,000 a month. I look back because I was looking to see, my point was going to be the overhead is so low, even the startup costs. You think about the classic ice cream 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 and all that. But this is so much easier, the investment. She said she invested under$10 ,000 to get it going. So that was a$10 ,000 reference. But to your point, I think there's so much versatility here. probably driving around selling in neighborhoods is not as profitable as getting that wedding gig, that corporate gig, the summer fair, whatever it is.

47:13That's probably where you can make a substantial amount of money. It is a bit seasonal. So I do go back to that seasonality thing. 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 hot coffee bike vendor. turn it flip it flip it on its head oh here it is okay 100 100 grand in five months out of the year with 75 profit margins what else could you sell out of the back of a bike um i think this is kind of a 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 could just ride that thing up and down the boardwalk.

48:01I don't even know if you'd have to have a permit up and down all day. You could probably make a killing. Yeah. These are the little, the little ideas that I absolutely love because it's like, it doesn't cost you anything to get it started. And then hopefully, I mean, do your due diligence on what kind of regulations and requirements you're going to have, you know, to be a food vendor, but pretty quick to get off the ground. And, you know, you know, selling ice cream on a hot day is a pretty easy sell. So doing good. The last one on this list. Number 10 is, I don't know how real this is. This is a real life wedding crasher that's been written up in a few different sources.

48:35One recent one was in the New York Post. This is Ernesto Reinares Varela. He lives in Spain and he is a professional wedding crasher for a base fee of 500 euros, roughly$550. Ernesto says he's going to, I'm going to come and I will crash your wedding. I'm going to 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 at the altar. That seems 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 crashers, like hiring someone to be like the life of the party, right?

49:21Like if you want your wedding to be awesome, hire someone who like super outgoing, super funny, super loud, and we'll show up and like dance the night away and get the party going, right? I didn't expect it to be somebody who would show up and crash your wedding with the intent to break it up. And so there's enough details in here. It feels pretty legit, but I was like, there's no way. But he said 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 solving your wedding cold feet. Like, I guess that's a thing.

49:49This is proof that you only need a certain number of clients. You don't need to sell to the entire world. Yeah, there's a market for anything. And we talked to Jen Glantz from Bridesmaids for Hire. Is this a real thing? She's like, yeah, people will hire me to be their maid of honor, to help kind of be a shoulder to cry on, to be a friend for them on this day. And she built a really interesting business around that. So the part that got me was like, is this for real? It was at the end of the article. he says, I get paid extra if I get hit. Like if the groom or the groomsmen are like punching me or slapping me on my way out, you know, I get 50 euros for every extra hit.

50:29So like, obviously, I don't want to get hurt. But I kind of want to take my time too, because that's where I make my money. It's like, 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, don't end up in the hospital. Maybe put away a couple hundred more euro on the way out. I was a wedding photographer in my first career.

50:56I 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. I 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, like, do you know that person? They're like, no, no, I don't know that person. I thought that was me and my, and both of them had the same story.

51:22Like, no, I didn't know that person. Same venues in town. So there are definitely people who crash weddings. I didn't know anybody was hired to crash weddings. They're just there for the free food and drinks. Yeah, yeah, I think so. The social aspects. I mean, there's some nice weddings out there, but to do it professionally, that is next level. I will tell you, that is next level. Yeah, 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 sharing this with us.

51:52So you got the agency, you got 201creative.com, you're hosting the Niche Pursuits podcast, you got the Weekend Growth newsletter at weekendgrowth.com slash newsletter. You've got the Amazon Influencer, but you got a lot of stuff going on, man of many online side hustles. What's got you excited these days? I do, I do. Yeah, Yeah, the marketing agency is my day job. That's what I do. But 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.

52:24What 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 on Amazon Influencer. How many videos have you made? 1 ,250 now. I'm actually going to go make some videos right after this podcast. The house is empty. My wife and the kids are gone. I'm going to go make some videos right after this podcast. So I'm trying to get to about$1 ,350 before the Black Friday sale season hits. Okay.

52:48And is this just, you can't have bought$1 ,300 things off of Amazon. Like, where are you getting the stuff to film about? So yeah, we buy probably a good amount on Amazon, but we bought nowhere near$1 ,300. 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? You can also get creative and go to neighbor's houses and film. If you can go down to your neighbor's house, you can like sit there, you can use your coffee machine for a couple minutes, a couple, you know, maybe an hour, however long it takes to figure it out and then make a video on that.

53:20I 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 Airbnbs and rent them and then film all the products there. Okay, okay, nice. So that's how you can get more videos 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 bought on Amazon as long as it's available on Amazon.

53:45So that's another key factor. Right. Do you find that it is just a factor of creating the content and building that library of a thousand plus videos that that's what drives revenue or is there other specific tactics that go into it? Honestly, no, not really. Not that I've figured out. I mean, it is a side hustle for me, so I haven't sat there, but they don't give you many metrics. They don't tell you a lot. It's really about 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 rule, by the way, like almost everything else in life.

54:19Totally. 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 going to connect on. Yeah. We started doing some of the kids Lego videos and trying to make them. their first passive income on the internet. I remember giving them that 20 bucks over Christmas season last year. And they'd be like, cool. Pause right there. You just made passive income on the internet. I don't think you have an appreciation for how cool this is and how easy this was for you.

54:52So I will back you up that the influencer program is probably the easiest money that I've ever made online. I have uploaded very, very few this year and I'm looking at 669 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 haven't said like what level of social following you need. They just make sure you apply with your YouTube or Instagram or something.

55:23They 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 Instagram accounts that have over 1 ,000 followers just from friends and family and work colleagues over the years. So you can flip that into a business account. It doesn't really change the outward account itself. And a lot of people will have success with something like that or maybe a TikTok account they started.

55:52So it's worth applying. It's definitely worth applying. Very good. Well, check him out, 201creative.com. John Dykstra gave you a plug last month. So I appreciate that. And weekendgrowth.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 Thanksgiving, I think will be our seventh annual on that. 10 creative side hustles, like the most interesting stuff that I've come across over the course of the year.

56:28Now that's kind of the shotgun approach. So if you're looking for something a little more curated, what you do is go to hustle.show. You answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it'll build you a personalized playlist of eight to 10 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 sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.

56:58That 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 got to be somebody on that Venn diagram of yours. So appreciate you sharing that. 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.