The Side Hustles That Actually Worked For Me
Tags: Life, Self Improvement, Productivity, Life Lessons, Work

The Side Hustles That Actually Worked For Me

A primer on money-making that doesn’t drive you mad

Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash

Everybody likes money — so much so that a lot of people spend hours upon hours just for a handful of cents answering surveys, doing menial work, and even solving captchas by hand.

This post is not that, it’s a list of side hustles that have actually worked for me. Better even: these are all things I either enjoyed or “didn’t hate".

Offline side jobs

Over the years I worked on a farm, in construction, in a warehouse — and I had a heck of a time (de-)constructing event locations back when those were still a thing.

Right now I’m driving around throwing pizza at people and somehow they give me money for being out and having fun.

To me that was always the key point: All of these jobs can be a whole lot of fun if you wrap your mind around them and learn how to enjoy work as a hobby. In each of these places I had coworkers who were like me and others who absolutely hated the work.

While the others complained about the free food being leftovers from the kitchen instead of five-star meals we were having a great time joking and laughing. And we enjoyed the best tasting sandwiches you could get after some long hours of tough, physical work that clears your mind.

And that is before you factor in how these jobs all paid surprisingly well, how you don’t have to pay taxes on anything up to 450€ in side income (at least here in Germany) and how the work was basically a free gym membership where they give you money to work out.

If you can get into that mindset and enjoy what the jobs can offer you this is easily the best way to earn money because the hard work is all on someone else’s part.

A moderately successful YouTube channel

For a long time I had lots of fun together with my best friend with a hobby-based YouTube channel about magnetfishing. This channel never had more than 8k subscribers, and yet it paid for all my power tools, afforded me a pickup truck that we used to get rid of all the scrap metal — and most importantly we enjoyed this hobby greatly.

That is the power of YouTube and I’m still bitter that magnetfishing is now outlawed in most parts of Germany, I would still head out every other weekend to pull scrap metal out of rivers and canals.

This is how my weekends looked for over two years. Good times.

Instead I’m now doing programming videos where I share my experiences and lessons from the last eight years, the woes of job hunting, and the joy of coding for fun. See if you like what I do:

Writing and translation

These days I obviously write here on Medium and my own site www.codingtofreedom.com — but for a great deal of my school years I worked as a freelance translator between German and English through Fiverr and private follow-up gigs that spawned from there.

Translation is great because it lets you focus on typing more than writing — a great way to unwind after a long day of six hours in school. I paid for my scooter this way and I used that to get to my first job interview which landed me my coding apprenticeship and later day job.

I had this odd little tool that showed text paragraph by paragraph and allowed you to easily translate them one at a time for rapid progress. I can’t seem to find that again no matter how hard I look, but I clearly remember it being shareware that looked like the good old Windows XP days, and yet it worked like a charm.

Monetized curation blogs

For a good three years I ran a network of monetized Tumblr blogs that curated niche-specific content, eventually reaching a total of two million followers. Eventually, Tumblr in their wisdom decided to change their rules, lose 30% of their traffic within months, and got sold for a fraction of what they had been acquired for.

But the idea of content curation is still valid if you stick to Tumblr’s new rules, definitely valid in many other places on the internet. Just think about mailing lists that digest and curate content, job offers, access to spreadsheets full of data — curation is evergreen if you figure out how to make it work for yourself.

The great part about Tumblr was that it was fully automated, with looping queues and completely hands-off and earned me more than my day job during good months. So definitely keep curation efforts in mind for the next time you dig through your life for monetizable skills.

Selling scrap art

Now this was built right on top of my Youtube channel and I also made sales online — but all of that was unrelated to the offline sales on flea markets.

There are exactly three things you need:

A 15$ angle grinder

A 30-150$ stick welding setup

A source of scrap metal

This is a very physical business, but at the same time also one that is great fun, easy to pick up, and that can be replicated in every city at least once and still find interested customers. Just try your hands at it with some scrap flowers made from old rebar and bicycle parts, those actually sell for ten or fifteen bucks.

Bottle openers, garden decoration, if you add a drill to your toolset you can also start making those birds from metal and stones that you can oftentimes see. In terms of material cost and business risks any of these “flea market businesses” will be extremely cheap to get into, but expect a substantial time commitment during the summer. Ideally you pair it with an Etsy store for the best of both worlds.

User testing

I know I just listed surveys as horrible in the intro — but user testing actually worked for me. You sit down, go through a website and record yourself struggling with certain elements. Fifteen minutes, no big drama, no big payment. Decent enough though, I always liked this work and wonder why I ever stopped.

Summary: earning money can be fun

I love earning money on the side, especially so of course when it’s on my own terms and time commitment like here on Medium, on YouTube, or on my own website. But when it comes to those physical, offline side jobs that I’ve held over the years those were great fun as well, perfect to clear my mind after a long work week and to have a physical balance to the desk job.

These days I make good use of my car license and deliver pizza with a company car which basically comes out to being paid to drive around and explore the city while somebody else pays for gas and maintenance.