10 Scary-Good Side Hustles That Make Real Money.

• A humorous take on horror movies and personal anecdotes
• Exploring successful side hustles around Halloween
• Analysis of unique business ideas and their scalability
• Engaging discussion about creative entrepreneurship
• Fun examples of niche markets and customer engagement

I can't do. Are you a horror movie fan? I like cannot do horror movies. 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 and I looked, I 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 where I would, this is the only way I would really watch a horror movie is. But it's with 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 go was. It was not. I was not in a good place.

So I do horror movies, like give me a comedy any day of the week. But so some of her videos, like she's got her reacting to, you know, some of these older classic horror movies like Exorcist and Predator and Aliens, Silence of the Lambs. Like these have between 150,000 views and 200,000 views.

And so you can plug the channel and 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 you know, it says up to $2,000 a month just in YouTube ad revenue from Catatches Horror Movies.

Plus he's got a Patreon campaign or Patreon, you know, support cat for this with almost 300 paying members, anywhere from 3 to $10, $10 a month and you get, you know, special bonus footage or you get inside access. I don't know what their different tiers are, but pretty well monetized for a side hustle that's only a couple of years deep.

I was blown away in the article by how many people are paying her. I think she said her most popular tier 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, you know, kind of creating a concept, creating an idea and then once it gets traction, there's usually several layers that can go deeper in that.

Um, 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. Um, 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.

That was a central premise. They were, like, really poorly produced or terrible storylines or 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 putting her own spin on something that was done and successful 20 years ago. Yeah, exactly. It goes back to the rip, pivot and jam framework from the tropical MBA 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, see if you can get some traction with that.

This genre of reaction videos is a tried and true thing. It could be. You know, we saw it during the pandemic. Like, lawyer reacts to, you know, stimulus package bill, or, I don't know, writer reacts to this, you know, opening line of some novel by my friend Grant Baldwin. It runs the speaker lab. And it was, you know, him reacting to these famous TED Talks and stuff.

It's like's a. It's a formula that can work in a lot of different niches. Yeah, it, um, it reminds me of like, you know, my. My nephew is young and like, he will watch on YouTube people playing a game to both learn, but actually kind of it's like a community event, you know, watching on YouTube or live.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe. 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, you know, podcast reactions we don't watch. Listen to this podcast with the W Windneck. 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 Adsense or, you know, from Google Views, watching horror movies. So there. There's a side hustle for you. Maybe pivot that to your own niche. She doesn't even like horror movies.

All right, what's. What's next on your list here? What else have we got? Yeah, so next up is pumpkin carving. I mean, it is a Halloween here, so why would we not at least jump into something specific to the Halloween holiday itself? And this is Mark, Evan and Chris Soa and they started manicpumpkincarvers.com and basically they carved 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. But they're charging like, you know, three figures over a hundred dollars high hundred dollars for some of these.

And they're making a pretty good side hustle income. Yeah, this is maniacpumpkincarvers.com and this truly they truly are works 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. Like okay, we can capture a picture of it but like next month this pumpkin is going to rot away.

But 150 do to $700 per pumpkin. And according to side hustle school, they're doing 500 to 1,000 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 $7 for a custom pumpkin but that you it pencils out or estimates out to be over $100,000, maybe $150,000 for a very seasonal business that, that I got to imagine 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 cash in 100 grand doing pumpkin art, if that's something you love to do. I 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 gives them access to it.

Like you said corporate clients and that sort of thing. But I mean it's also seems somewhat scalable. You know, you got 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. Um, I'm 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. Yeah. Any other food related or like this temporary art thing for. You. You gu. See 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. Um, like you know, maybe, maybe these guys have a corner on the pumpkin market. Like is there another niche where you think this might work? Well, yeah, you know, it's interesting to you to bring it up. My father in law ran for 40 years, was an ice carver.

That was his, that was his business. Okay. Wow. So funny you brought that up. And so um, yeah, he would get hired for a lot of the types of things you just talked about. And um, he would make ice carvings of a whole different variety of things. He would do Eiffel Towers for French themed parties. He would do um, a Statue of Liberty for a New York theme 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 of year he would do great gadby them to parties and he would build ice sculptures for that.

So leaning into 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.

Like it's just a good old time to carve pumpkins and like hey, I got 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 well what, what skills do I have? What could I turn into a side hustle?

I want to invite you to take our 2-minute quiz @sidehustlenation.com 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. Now the third one on this list is kind of a creepy crawly one. And this is Jeff Neal who is running the critterdepot.com.

This is a cricket breeding and I think e-commerce business where he sells live crickets to primarily reptile owners. Like people who, who need crickets to feed their brother pets. And 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, like uh, wow, like side hustling your way with crickets. But it makes sense.

So many people have pet reptiles. I mean at my agency we, we do work with some veterinarians and so I, I know for a fact that um, 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 good collection of people that have these types of animals and you gotta find, you got to find food for them.

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. He said he has a bearded dragon. I was kind of intrigued. I mean, yeah, I want to say we had somebody on the show, you know, or somebody in the community who had like a bearded dragon niche site early on all about, you know, taking care of these, you know, because it's.

You find a million and one dog sites and probably a site for every specific breed. But, you know, okay, I'm going to have to go a little more niche if I want to find something, you know, maybe a little bit less competitive on that keyword research there. Growing up, I had a pet frog as a kid. As the story goes, I was fairly young.

We were at a lake, you know, kind of nearby and there were all these tadpoles and I might, I said, dad, can I, can I take a tadpole home? And he raised it as a frog. He's like, yeah, if you catch one, we can take it home. Thinking, I'd never catch one. I don't know how. Must have. That was my day to buy a 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 down to the pet store to buy crickets once in a while. And I remember it being quite the process.

Yeah, marketing wise, it sounds like Jeff is relying on these like reptile forums, like good old forum marketing. Go where your customers already are. Well, they're hanging out in these bearded dragon forums or other reptile forums and hey, you know, 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's such the. It's a great way to look if you're looking at what kind of side 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 that maybe you could find a solution for and then see if other people want it?

What is kind of cool about this niche is, yeah, there's 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 keep making more and you sell off the and it's like we had 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 then I cut off the limbs of it and then those re-propagate and it's like, it's almost this cool like infinite loop where almost zero cost of goods sold.

You know, the farther down the road that you get and was. I thought that was really interesting. I'm thinking of like sourdough starter and like, yeah, like the home brew and like, you know, I know you have your starter for that and obviously not a not very good at any of those things. But it's just to your point, like got my mind thinking like this kind of almost self-perpetuates it.

Yeah, I think that's one of those really exciting ones. We had a guy met 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 like, okay, just keep it, keep it.

Rolling Amazing. All right, we'll be back with more Halloween themed side hustles with Jared right after this. All right, 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 spouse's picture and it mashes them together and it gives kind of this age progression. Like, oh, at 4 years old they're going to look like this, this was launched by Yan Go out of Singapore called rbabyai.com. launched April 2023. Charged nine bucks for a set of AI created baby pictures.

I want, there's got to be like a face mash app that had been doing it. Like I don't know if the AI angle is 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 Yan's personal site.

Sold that site this year for an undisclosed five-figure sum 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. Didn't 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, I have kids and I know when we were, you know, doing all the stuff while, you know, pregnantly and up to it, like they're like, hey, you want to get that 3D image of your baby and all that.

I, you know, always thought it looked 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 it was six. I mean it feels like one of those things that, you know, it's, 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. Yeah. And throwing dollars at something probably for most people on a whim. I doubt anybody's 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 he got a viable side. Hust a lot of it. Yeah, it is 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's 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 an I and see like well, did it, did it generate a kid that looks anything like ours? That's actually a good point.

I mean, we have no idea how accurate. I mean, this is. To some degree it's going to take years for it to I guess determine if it's accurate. But you know, um, why not? I mean, he had fun with the whole thing. He's got a, a post on Twitter, my silly website. Our baby AI that doesn't actually solve a problem has crossed $10,000 in total revenues. I think he kind of knew it was a fun thing.

Yeah. Hopefully everybody who bought those pictures thought, you know, it was kind of a fun thing. Yeah. Are there any other, you know, one of the AI side hustles would be building, you know, an internal GPT for organizations or building kind of like a customer response bot for different organizations based on the knowledge base or something like any other, you know, could be in this fun category or it 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, I'll talk about it maybe if we have time to get into like what kind of side houses is 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 Weekend Growth newsletter.

I'm repurposing on Medium and um, Medium's 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. And a couple of months ago, my wife and I were in the hardest time meal planning 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 about I just write a GPT for it? And so I did. And so it's a GPT and then, um, 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, that perpetual question of, you know, what's for dinner? And you know, there's companies solving it in different ways, obviously from the, you know, done for you meal kit delivery type of things down to Paprikas is a meal planning app that's been mentioned.

Cook Smarts we've used off and on. But yeah, there was, you know, maybe there is this AI assisted type of thing that'd be really cool to figure out. Okay, what's the grocery list? Right. You know, what are the proportions that need to go at this? 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 assists on that. My friend even gave me an idea on that. He read the article and he's like, you know, you could probably do it where you actually just take a picture of your fridge and your cupboard and it kind of learns, it sees what you already have so you don't have to go buy that again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We already have, have this stuff. I like it. What's, 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 OpenAI framework and there's a whole section on GPT 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, um, make the GPT, you can play around with it, you can test it, you can use it, and 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 could upload 10 years of podcast archives and build, build something that would, that would be helpful. I mean, the challenge of creating a side hustle through AI is that it's going to always be changing.

But the brilliance of using AI to create a side hustle, I think, is that, you know, there's low barriers to entry U. Obviously, the 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 u, 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 way back to the AI baby. Yeah. Photo thing, you know, and, and so, yeah, it's, it's an interesting opportunity. It really is 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 robotic, but we're really here in the flesh. Very good. So we have number four, this AI baby generator making 10 grand 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 like 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. They stopped working and, uh, et cetera.

But basically u in their first weekend, the 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, so 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 u 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.

Then 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 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. If 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 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, he described there. There is more. I mean, any vending machine has some. Something, you either got to go restock it or you got to go service it, 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, shoot, why didn't the resort think of this? If they're having that kind of ROI, why didn't the resort just put them in themselves? But that's. That's not the business that they're in. They want to stay in their lane. They want to delegate this little extra service to somebody else.

This is distinctive vending.com if you want to check it out. So he's got the. You think he's got a balloon machine that makes balloon animals? Don't. That seems even more complicated. But again, almost no cost of goods hold like a little rubber balloon.

And, uh, you charge three, four, five bucks for that, and you're doing pretty well. Yeah, it said. He said that in 2024, he's on track to make 500 grand in revenue. Wow, that's quite the side hustle. Obviously, we don't know the, you know, the net profit or anything like that.

My, uh, my wife, when she was, uh, she was on a team growing up, and they would fundraiseising. Their most successful fundraiser was renting a snow cone machine and then going into 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 thousands in one day selling snow cones even after the rental and the cost of goods sold.

Yeah, selling frozen water and sugar syrup is some pretty good margins in that too. So this is u. 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 like an 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 novelty factor of like, well, shoot, I've never seen a cotton candy vending machine before, so I think that works in its favor.

And you can kind of get inspiration from this stuff'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.

But you always 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. It's like, all right, buddy, you know, strap into the ergo. Let's go for a walk. Yep. 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. This 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 key component is, you know, location, location, location. Just like real estate. In our vending machine episode we did earlier in the year was 599 cent with Mike Kaufman from vendingpreneurs. And 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?

And 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, 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. 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 u. Whatever it is, whether it's, you know, what we get in all. He talked about it in the. 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 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, you know, Christmas parties and things that people throw and how cool would it be to have like a cotton candy machine as the featured dessert for the night?

Yeah, it would almost be like, like a photo booth rental for this wedding, for this party or something like that. But 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, 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, okay, 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 had, you know, these huge, you know, animatronic zombies and stuff, and you get a button on the floor and watch them, you know, raise his arms up at you and make some noise. It's definitely become a thing with the inflatables and everything else to decorate your guard 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, we had Jack o'lanterns on the porch. Like that was it. Turn the light on. Jack o lanterns 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 lightupourholidays.com. they started doing Christmas lights 20 years ago in, in Chicago, 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, they are all about.

They give you free design, right? So like, there's clearly, like you're buying something that's unique. Um, this is probably a little bit different, 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 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 1st, this entire homepage gets changed over to Christmas. Right. Right now it's all Halloween themed. Yeah. And then we. Well 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 get 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.

So you got to check out this woman on Instagram. Her handle is Porch Pumpkins. 34,000 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. Two people that have no design skills, Is that what you're implying? That's kind of 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, but 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, um, like 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.

Ye. 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 into the 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. 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 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 and this lady in front of us in line, she. Her Entire car, no food, only pumpkins.

And you know, maybe, maybe she's the local version of porch pumpkins of Heather. And I was just, what are you going to do with somebody pumpkins? But maybe she's doing it as a sign business. We'll go, we'll go decorate some people's porches.

And this is such an interesting, I mean we, obviously she's doing so 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.

You know, Tik Tok Instagram, Instagram posting about this. You could probably build up enough of a head of stem 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 to have like SEO skills or necessarily have a U. 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 gonna 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 she spends most of her time is driving over trying to find all the pumpkins she needs. Yeah. Buy out a segment of the pumpkin patch and make sure they got only the good looking ones.

Porscpumpkins.com. you can find it over there. We've got more Halloween-themed side hustles. Scary good side hustles with Jared coming up right after this. 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 it's very into like what his character is wearing in, you know, whatever game it is.

If it's Minecraft or it's like Nintendo Switch Sports, like, oh, I got this upgraded jacket. Like who cares? Like I just want to play the game. Like you spend so much time on this stuff. But there's a huge market around this. So this is Ksia Watson, 22-year-old selling Roblox clothes.

And I did not know this was a thing, but she does brilliance 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 hustling that is something that you create once so over and over again like an app or piece of software or a piece of content. But $0.02 per sale.

It was definitely 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 20, 23, over $110,000 according to like I was verified by CNBC I suppose.

And I mean this piggyback St. When I first saw this story on our, on our list here today, I thought it was going to be like, hey, the classic Halloween costume rental place. You know, local boat Halloween.

Yeah, yeah. You know, especially if you're not to sew or you know, you can just like I was thinking in my head how great that idea is. Even not even 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 could 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. That's, that seems to be where she earned a lot of her money.

Yeah, this is an interesting one. It's trying to go, um, 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 hire market. You got to go find those corporate clients that, that really have budget to spend in like in a digital world. In this case. Yeah, it's, it's.

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. Um, but it's a great example of, like you said, kind of going upmarket and, 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.

But the near-term thing is like, why don't I go do portraits, weddings, senior photos, family photos, you know, corporate events, and charge 3, 4, 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 gotta 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?

And that's something that's kind of been on my mind lately where it's like, okay, you could sell, you know, onesie twosies or you could go license this to somebody. We had a guy who was doing like 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 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.

Like they care about this 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. I thought that was a great pitch.

This reminds me in equal parts, like 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.

U and then, you know, it caught, it 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, yeah, 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. Yeah, there, 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'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 and 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? 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 was like, what do these numbers mean?

Like the +120 or the min? I don't know. I had to asked my friend this weekend, like what does it mean when it says like +1300 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 sportsbooks are going to have different odds on different games and the arbitrage opportunity is to find one where this sportsbook says, you know, the Yankees are going to win and this sportsbook says the Yankees are going to lose and you find the so but 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.

Like it sounds tedious, sounds impossible to do without software. And that's why there's a bunch of software. You know, I don't want to plug any of them. I can't, 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. 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 or they probably don't care.

But I don't know. 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 B 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 in 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 not I've never bet on a sporting event that I can think of in 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 make 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 leading 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, yeah, they haven't all updated in real-time, like there's some lag and that's kind of my.

You get inside information that this guy's injured and you know, before the sports book finds out or so there's a lot of stuff there where like 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 kind of getting involved in that.

Yeah, I was really surprised when we were watching football last weekend. You know, 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 like right now I thought it was a joke.

They were like oh no, they're like seriously promoting FandL or whatever. You know what it was, it was kind of surprising. It like oh I guess 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 window but there's got to be some people making this work. Mins me the movie 21 right where you know blackjack and learning to if you're smart enough at a time like you said, which a short-lived because they've caught onto that now and casinos don't allow you to.

To kind of 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.

So yeah, some degree that loophole has been closed now, but perhaps this one still reigns supreme. I love, I love me a, you know, an underdog taking down the casino story. I will read those, I will watch those all day long.

I don't think anybody was reading 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. Yeah't we'll throw that out there. 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.

I think it's a very interesting approach. Again because of my mathematical background. I like the idea behind it. Yeah. I mean if there's ever.

If there's ever risk free profit like that, that lane tends to get crowded right away. It's like is it. If it truly is. I mean there's probably risks associated risks in anything but you know, it doesn't last forever.

So it's got to be one of these, you know, get in while the get's good well, yep, exactly. That's a good way to put it. All right, what's u 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. Uh, it's Catherine O'Brien and she's the owner, the founder of Cream Cruiser.

Now, 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 um, 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 if she actually just straight up rode the bike to it or if she took it on a truck, 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's 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 u basically bike business university and that's @bikebusinessiversity.com and that is um, basically like teaching people how to start these businesses.

Right. And so this is tried and true model. And she makes $20,000 per month passively 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.

There's somebody doing this in our neighborhood and very seasonalim. I think she's in Baltimore. It's going to be equally seasonal there. But we always are calculated. See the guy comes by once a week after school when the weather's good you see him pop by the 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 the calculation?

How many do you think he sells a day? What kind of very low overhead mean? He's got a bike with 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 again going after the bigger ticket weddings, corporate events rather than just onesie twoie 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. 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 misspoke by the way. I said $10,000 a month. She 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 investment, she said she invested under $10,000 to get ITE. That 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 as getting that wedding gig, that corporate gig. Um, 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 seasonality 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 fall hot chocolate bike vendor or the, you know, the hot coffee bike vendor.

Turn it, flip it, flip it on its head. You know, 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? I think this is, you know, kind of a, you know, first it was u food trucks and it's like, well, what if we even.

That's too much overhead, right? Like, how do we shrink this down even, even further? So pretty cool. I think it's great. Especially again like um, I'm thinking about uh, where I live. Uh, 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. I don't even know if you'd have to have a permit. Been down all day. Think you could probably make a killing.

Yeah. These are the little ideas that I absolutely love because it doesn't cost you anything to get it started and then hopefully do your due diligence on what kind of regulations and requirements you're going to have to be a food vendor, but pretty quick to get off the ground.

And 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.

One recent one was in the New York Post. This is Ernesto Reyares Varrea. He lives in Spain and he is a professional wedding crasher. For a base fee of €500, roughly $550, Ernesto says he I'm gonna 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, like at the altar.

That he 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, um, what. When you say, like, wedding crashers, like, hiring someone to be, like, the life of the party, right?

Like, if 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 would show up and crash your wedding with the intent to break it up.

And so, yeah, there's. There's enough details in here. It feels pretty legit. But I was like, there's no way. But he says he's booked up and he'll basically show up. And like, for a cool €500, you can just kind of.

I guess if that's the way you want to go about 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. There's a market for anything. And we talked to Jen Glant from Bridesmaids for Hire, you know, and that was the same thing. It was kind of like, is this a real thing?

But she's like, yeah, you know, people will hire me to be there, maid of honor to help, you know, 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 this is a really interesting. 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 groomsmen are, like, punching me or slapping me on my way out.

You know, I get €50 for every extra hit. So like, obviously, I don't want to get hurt, but I kind of want to take my time, too, because that's how I make my money. I was 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 I go to the hospital to get, you know, stitches. Like, that takes away from my €500. I’m sure 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, Ye just seems I was a wedding photographer in my first career.

Um, I did that for a decade. And so, um, I have definitely seen the other side of that, which is people showed up at weddings. And um, 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, do you know that person're like no, no, I don't know that person. I thought that was me.

And both of them had the same story. Like no, I didn't know that person. Hu same venues in town. So there are definitely people who, who crash weddings. I didn't know anybody 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, uh, but, but, but to do it professionally, that is next level. I will tell you. That is next level.

Yeah. U 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 I appreciate you hanging out and sharing this with us. So you got the agency got 201creative.com, your re host in the niche pursuits podcast. You got the weekend growth [email protected] newsletter.

You got the Amazon influencer business. You've got a lot of stuff going on. A man of many online side hustles. What's got you excited these days? I do, I do.

Yeah. The marketing agency is my day job. U 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.

U 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. U 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 many.How many?

120050 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 130050 before the, the Black Friday sales season hits. Okay. And is this just. You can't have bought 13, 300 things off of amaz?

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 could kind of compare your old cell phone case with your new cell phone case and that's another video.

Right. Can also get creative and like go to neighbors houses and film. So you go to 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.

What? However long it takes to figure it out and then make a video on that. And I, 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, about all the stuff I'd in that air. Airbnb. But a lot of people will actually make that their model and go out to Airbnbs 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 bought on Amazon as long as it's available on Amazon.

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've figured out. I mean u. It is a side hustle for me. So I haven't like sat there and.

But they don't give you any 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 8020 rule by the way, like almost total everything else in life. Like 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, this is u.

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, give them that. I remember giving them that 20 bucks, like, over Christmas season last year, and they'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 have.

I'm looking at 669 bucks so far this year, and I probably have less than 50 videos live. Oh, yeah, it'it works. It's legit. It's a really cool, really cool program that they've got, you know, like anything.

Does it stay easy forever? Does it last forever? Probably not, but 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 they want some link to a social platform.

Even though you don't have to ever 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, you know, over a thousand followers just from friends and family and work colleagues over the years.

And yeah, 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 Tik Tok account they started. So it's worth applying. It's definitely worth applying. Very good. Well, check him out.

201creative.com John Dyjksra gave you a plug last month, so appreciate that. And weekend growth.com/newsletter to stay in touch with everything that Jared has got going on. If you liked 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 coming this coming Thanksgiving, I think will be our seventh annual on that ten Creative side Hustles like the most interesting stuff that I've come across over the course of the year.

Now 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 8 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 upsidehstlenation.com/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 got to be somebody on that Venn diagram of yours. So I 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.