The Side Hustle Show

Do you know there's a side hustle where you can get paid to drive around, take a few photos of houses being built, and turn it into a steady side income? That is the little-known real estate side hustle Lou Shaver from drawinspectortraining.com picked up in retirement. Lou is a construction loan draw inspector. It has almost no startup costs, no special license, and not much selling. He started it...

Today we’re sharing proven ways to grow your email list, engage your target audience, and ultimately make more money in your business. Chenell Basilio is back on the Side Hustle Show. She's the longtime listener turned go-to source for online business growth case studies, and she runs GrowthInReverse.com along with the Growth in Reverse podcast. A common theme in this episode is tap...

Here are five completely wild businesses, and somehow, each one had something worth stealing. Chandler Bolt, founder of SelfPublishing.com, is back on the Side Hustle Show for the first time in 12 years. He built an 8-figure business helping thousands of people write and publish books — and today, he's here to talk about five emerging business ideas, from a cake dropshipper to a virtual dating mat...

David Paxton had a passion for golf but quickly realized how expensive the sport can be. Between equipment, apparel, shoes, and greens fees, costs add up fast. As a self-described frugal guy, David appreciated good deals that helped make golf more affordable. So in July 2021, at the height of golf season, he had the idea to launch DailyGolfSteals.com — a website to curate and share the best daily...

The Side Hustle Show is designed to get you motivated and excited. This episode is the opposite — and that's the whole point. Nothing Much Happens is intentionally boring bedtime content for grown-ups, and it's been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. Falling asleep is one of the most universal pain points out there, and Kathryn Nicolai found a way to solve it. Before she was a content creat...

Eli Mash had been putting turmeric in his coffee for 10 years before it ever occurred to him that it could be a business. Now, Makor Coffee, the anti-inflammatory brand he co-founded, does over $100,000 in annual revenue and $11,000 in monthly recurring revenue, all while Eli works a full-time job and raises three kids. In this episode, Eli breaks down exactly how he and his co-founder got it off...

Thanks to AI, anybody can make an app now, but just because you can build it doesn't mean it'll make you money. Steve Young is the go-to expert on all things app marketing at AppMasters.com. He's been building, buying, and selling apps for many years, and he's back on the show nearly a decade after his previous appearance to break down how AI tools have lowered the bar for anyone to build a small...

What do a baby sleep mask, a detail van, and a print-on-demand candle have in common? They're all quietly generating serious income for real people — and in this episode, we dig into the numbers behind six of the most interesting side hustle stories making the rounds right now. I'm joined by Cody Berman — co-host of The FI Show and author of Retire by 30: How to Build Wealth, Gain Freedom, and Liv...

“Nothing puts a smile on a consumer's face quicker than a good peach.” And it turns out, flipping produce can be quite the profitable side hustle! ($3000 in one weekend from one stand before we recorded.) Shannon Houchin reached out to me and said, "Nick, you’ve got episodes on flipping books, mattresses, clearance products, domain names, flea market finds, and a ton of other stuff — but have I go...

What if you could earn $1,500 a month in side income with just an hour of work a week — and do it with a business that practically runs itself? That's exactly what Will Butterton has built with five ATMs through his company, Viking Vendors LLC. Will is a full-time engineer, a dad of three, and a multi-side-hustler who got into ATMs when his wife was pregnant and he started looking for something lo...

Live selling is having a moment and you don't need to be an influencer or have any e-commerce experience to get in on it. Clinton Benninghoff is a part-time pastor and full-time golf enthusiast who took over Golf HQ, a brick-and-mortar golf shop in Midland, Texas. He spent years building it into a community staple and developing relationships with the top golf brands. Then in October 2024, he join...

What if you could make money this weekend helping people clear out their homes without buying a single thing yourself? Estate sales have been around for decades, but a newer, fully online version of this business makes it faster, safer, and more efficient for everyone involved. And it’s wide open for someone willing to learn the ropes. Sue Antinoro (Bird's Nest Auctions) has spent the last 10-20 y...

What if you could build an always-on AI chief operating officer that handles your SEO, manages your inbox, and runs customer support — all for $200 a month? That's exactly what Jacques Hopkins has done with his 13-year-old online course business, Piano in 21 Days. He built an AI operator named Rocky using free, open-source software called OpenClaw — and says it's replaced a $3,500/month SEO agency...

For his side hustle, this week’s guest didn’t start from scratch. Instead, he bought a business that was already profitable, then he went out and tripled the revenue in his first year — all while working a full-time job. Jono Santamaria from Melbourne, Australia is the proud owner of Nina’s Laundrette, a local self-service laundromat. Jono bought the business a year and a half ago to diversify his...

What if you could set up the same tents and pillows every weekend — and get paid $800 to $1,000 each time you did it? That's exactly what Anne McGraw has built with Firefly Slumber Parties, a luxury tent slumber party rental business based in Nashville. Anne and her husband run it as a side hustle while both working demanding full-time jobs, and last weekend alone they did five parties at $800 to...

By month five, Jayden Clark's dropshipping side hustle was generating more profit than his corporate salary. Two years after that, he sold the business for $700,000. The twist: he never bought a single unit of inventory upfront. Jayden was 27 when a post-vacation reality check made him realize he couldn't spend the next 40 years living for one week off a year. After exploring Amazon FBA, he landed...

What if your inventory cost you nothing, and companies actually called you to come take it? That's the business Angie Nelson has built over the last 18 years. She runs Angie's Green Go Surplus on eBay and eWasteDirect.com, an electronic recycling company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her team does five to seven business pickups a day, collecting roughly 50,000 pounds of e-waste every month — for...

In this week’s episode, I sit down with the Niche Pursuits Podcast to discuss what it takes to build a successful podcast from the ground up. As the host of The Side Hustle Show since 2013, I have over 700 episodes under my belt and a staggering 35 million lifetime downloads. We dig into how I got started, what’s been the key to growth, how I think about listener engagement, and the practical step...

What if you could rent out digital real estate just as you would traditional real estate, but without all the headaches that come with maintaining a property? That’s exactly what Luke Van Der Veer is doing with his digital “Rank and Rent” business. What Luke does is he builds a local service business website, then “rents” it out to a local, less digital-savvy business that is more than happy for t...

What can a crossing guard, a car negotiator, and a mindfulness bracelet teach you about building a side hustle? Quite a bit, it turns out. This week, I sat down with Jason VanDevere to talk about some of the most unique side hustle ideas out there right now. Jason is the creator of the Goal Crazy and Goal Crazy Planners, author of Dream Driven: The Step-by-Step Process to Discover Your Perfect Bus...

What does 24 years of hard-won entrepreneurial lessons look like in one place? Here are the biggest ideas from over a decade of building side hustles, interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs, and learning what actually works. This is a collection of honest, practical principles — some learned through success, some through failure — that can help you start smarter, grow faster, and keep going when t...

What if you could turn a single dollar into $5,000 in under a month? That's exactly what happened to Mindy, a member of Shannon Jean's reselling mastermind community. She bought two pallets of books from a government auction for $1 total, discovered they were packed with medical and curriculum books selling for $200 to $400 each, and turned that dollar into $5,000 within about a month. And she's s...

A guest early on in the Side Hustle Show said this: "Why am I more excited to make $5 passively than I am to make $5,000 actively?" And whether or not that is true in your case, it is a line that stuck with me because that $5 can scale. The $5,000 usually can’t. Chelsea Shelton is a former elementary school teacher, a mom of three, and a digital products coach at Gold City Ventures, the same progr...

Creating assets you can sell over and over again — that’s the passive income dream, right? This is exactly what Rachel Jones has done by creating and selling downloadable printables on Etsy. This year she’s averaging over $10,000 a month in sales, all while balancing a full-time job and two young kids. Rachel started in 2018, and took her Etsy business full-time in 2021. Note: I call this the Buy...

Half a million dollars in hamster balls. What if you spotted a gap in a market that hadn’t changed in 50 years and turned it into a fast-growing product business while still in college? That’s exactly what Ethan Haber did with Happy Habitats, a small pet products company he started as a sophomore at Wake Forest University. While watching his hamster Mooksy roll around in a standard hamster ball on...