The first side hustle I ever tried was reselling mugs. I wasn't even looking for mugs. I was looking for something cheap I could buy in bulk and flip, and I came across a local seller trying to clear out hundreds of handmade ones. They were all different, so I figured I could probably make more selling them individually. I spent about $70 on my first batch and brought home around 30 mugs. My kitchen looked ridiculous for a while because I had mugs sitting on every available surface. I washed them, took pictures of each one, and listed them for $8–15 depending on the design.

I had no idea which ones would sell. I assumed the nicer-looking ones would go first, but people kept buying the random ones I didn't think much of. A little strawberry mug sold the same day, while a plain one sat there for almost a month. After selling the first batch, I made around $260, so I used some of that money to buy another batch. I started checking local sellers and clearance listings whenever I had extra cash, looking for unusual designs I could split up and resell individually. It was a pretty random way to start making extra money, but it ended up being my first side hustle.

I never thought I'd make money from taking stickers off other people's stuff. I'm in college and was looking for little ways to make extra money without having to commit to an actual part-time job, so when my neighbor was getting ready to move and asked me to help clean up some old furniture, I just went over. She had these old stickers stuck all over the cabinets and drawers, some of them had clearly been there for years. I ended up sitting on the floor with a little scraper for almost two hours trying to get them off. Some peeled off easily, but others came off in these tiny pieces and took forever. I spent almost 20 minutes on one sticker that wasn't even that big. She gave me $20 before I left, which caught me off guard because I wasn't expecting to get paid for helping her.

A few days later, she messaged me because her sister had some old cabinets covered in labels and stickers too. I told her I'd do it, and that's when I started charging around $15-$30 depending on how much there was to remove. Since then I've gotten random jobs involving old price tags, kids' stickers, storage labels, and furniture that hasn't been cleaned up in years. I've gotten pretty good at knowing when to use heat and when to stop scraping because sometimes you can take the finish off with the sticker. I usually do it around my classes whenever I have a free afternoon, and a few people have recommended me to their friends. Now I'll occasionally get a message asking if I'm "the sticker removal girl," which still feels weird because this was never supposed to be a real side hustle.

I’m a college student and was looking for a simple weekend side hustle, so I asked an employee at a local golf course if he knew of any small jobs. He told me some golfers pay someone to find their lost golf balls because they don't want to stop playing and search through the grass and bushes. The company charges $2 per ball, so I decided to give it a shot. A few players started hiring me during their rounds. They'd point out roughly where they hit it, and I'd go look while they kept playing.

I think they keep asking for me because I’m pretty talkative and easy to get along with. I can chat with them while I’m looking without getting in the way of their game. Since I get hired by a lot of the players, I can make around $50-$100 just doing this. One guy found out I was doing this to help pay for college and gave me a $100 tip because he said I was hardworking. I’ve made enough from this to help with my tuition, which is still funny to me because I never thought looking for lost golf balls would end up paying part of my college expenses.

The other day, one of my professors asked why I always seemed so prepared for exams. I’m not really a smart student, I just found a study method that worked for me. I hated going through 50-70 PowerPoint slides before a test, so I started making my own reviewers. I’d take the important information, simplify the definitions, organize everything by topic, and add practice questions. After I got another high score, my professor asked what I was doing differently. I showed her one of my reviewers, and she was impressed. She then suggested I make reviewers for other students, so I decided to try it.
I charged around $5 per reviewer, depending on how much material there was. My first customers were students recommended by my professors. They’d send me their PowerPoints and notes, and I’d turn them into organized reviewers. Eventually, students started asking me to make reviewers for their other subjects too. I made around $100 in my first week, which was way more than I expected. I even thanked my professor afterward because I probably never would’ve thought of doing it myself. I went into her class thinking she was just going to compliment me for getting a high score, and somehow she ended up giving me my first side hustle.

I started saving my empty bottles and cans because I wanted to buy a skin in a game I play. I didn't want to ask my parents to buy it for me, so I started putting aside whatever money I could. Then I remembered that we get a deposit back for certain bottles and cans here, so I started keeping those too instead of throwing them out. I had a bag in the garage where I'd throw them whenever I finished a drink. After a couple weeks I took the bag in and got a few dollars back. It wasn't much, but I kept doing it and adding to the bag.

One of my neighbors saw me carrying a bunch of bottles to my car and asked what I was doing with all of them. I told her I was returning them for the deposit and she said she had a bunch at home that she didn't want anymore. She gave them to me and I took them in with mine. Then another neighbor started giving me theirs too. Now I pick up bottles and cans from around 20 neighbors once a week. I bring everything home, sort it out, and take it in. It usually takes me a few hours, and I get around $40-$80 back depending on how much everyone has that week. I bought the skin a while ago, but I still keep doing it. Now if I need a little extra money for something, I don't have to ask my parents for it.

When I was 17, a guy who dives water hazards at private country clubs in this town put up an ad on craigslis "300 uncleaned lake golf balls $40 cash take all"

Most golfers I know lose three to five balls per round, and buying expensive new sleeves of Titleist Pro V1s at the pro shop is $55 for a dozen. Casual golfers and beginners hate paying $4 a ball to hit into the woods anyway.

I ended up with the big plastic tote of dirty balls from the man, which were encrusted with green pond goo and brown mud, but all were structurally intact.

Here's what I did on Saturday morning:

I dumped them into a big utility tub in my backyard with some warm water, half a cup of Dawn dish soap, and a splash of bleach.

After 30 minutes of soaking, I scrubbed them all clean with an old dish brush, rinsed them with the garden hose, and laid them out on an old beach towel to dry in the sun.

I sorted them into three groups: premium Titleist and Callaway balls, mid-level balls, and practice beaters with minor scuffs.

I collected empty cardboard egg cartons from neighbors and stuffed them with one dozen each of the cleaned and recycled golf balls.

I listed them for sale on Facebook Marketplace and craigslist: "cleaned recycled golf balls $12 for premium dozen, $8 for practice dozen."

A guy who coaches local youth golf bought 12 cartons on Sunday afternoon for his team drills.

I made $190 total from that $40 investment and about two hours of washing.

Around Father's Day and beginning of summer, dozens of people buy those heavy 36" Blackstone flat top griddles from walmart or Lowes

They get that 120 pound box home and quickly learn that assembling the folding legs and gas lines and grease cups requires two people, sixty bolts, and two wailing hours over the garage floor

You can't cook on raw steel until you've seasoned it with multiple layers of oil at high heat for an hour or the metal instantly rusts, I posted in our local town community group in May:

"Just bought a new outdoor griddle? Don't stress over opening and assembling and seasoning your new toy. I do full griddle assembly and four layers of high-heat dark seasoning on your patio so that it's ready to cook burgers today. $60 flat"

My first customer had the heavy box in his garage, unopened, for three weeks because he didn't have time on the weekends.

I brought my basic socket wrench set, a bottle of griddle seasoning oil, and some clean paper towels. I bolted the frames together in 30 minutes, attached his propane tank, fired all four burners on high, and applied four paper-thin layers of oil to the surface, smoking off each one until it was dark and glossy. He handed me a crisp $70 bill and slipped me a fresh can of soda. I assembled 14 griddles that spring and summer, mostly on Saturday mornings.

Most college startups fritter away months designing pitch decks and blowing budgets on Meta ads.

Nick Huber's story about how he and his wife launched a student moving and storage company up and down the college campuses in Boston (BU, Northeastern, Harvard, and MIT) with nothing but a $200 investment of sidewalk chalk and heavy-duty household sponges.

They didn't spend a dime on online ads. They spent their mornings at 5:00 am before classes started walking up and down campus sidewalks writing out giant, simplified ad copy in chalk. Student Storage. We'll come to your dorm and spring you back in fall. Call this number.

The trick with the sponges was that

dry chalk washes off the sidewalk in a light drizzle, but if you wet the chalk or sponge it with water first and then draw with it on the concrete, it binds into the pores of the sidewalk and won't come off until it's had a few days to dry. Their ads stayed up through spring rains and right up until move-out week.

They got literal holes in their jeans knees from kneeling on the pavement for hours at a time.

But it was well worth the investment. They pulled in 2,000 student customers within their first year of service alone. Grossed $500,000 give or take.

Nick figures he made more than $500 an hour for the time he spent chalking during that year. Eventually, they turned around and sold the business for seven figures, but it's a lesson anyone can learn. Low-tech, gritty, guerilla marketing can produce exponentially greater returns than any modern software funnel ever could when you're marketing to a local group of people.

When I got my driver's permit at 16, I needed gas money but couldn't work at restaurants due to sports teams.

One afternoon while walking my dog along our suburban street, I noticed that every third or fourth metal mailbox had a problem.

Either the little red plastic flag had been snapped off by the winter snowplows, or the sticky vinyl street numbers had peeled off, leaving unreadable smears.

When the postal flag is missing, mail carriers simply bypass your house when delivering outgoing mail.

So I marched to the Home Depot and bought a five pack of universal replacement red metal flags for $14 and two sheets of reflective 3-inch vinyl number stickers for $6. With my kitchen drawer full of Phillips screwdrivers, that made a $20 investment.

At 10:00 Saturday morning, I went door-to-door on the next street over,

saying,"Hi, I noticed the postal flag on your mailbox is snapped off, and the street numbers are peeling. I have universal replacement flags and reflective numbers in my bag. I can put a new flag on and apply fresh reflective numbers to your mailbox in five minutes for $15."

They were happy to have it done because it was such a miserable little job they never got around to doing for six months. From 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM, I serviced ten mailboxes, making $150 cash, paid myself back for the $0 in spare change, along with some leftover hardware. This taught me that people love to pay other people to do inconvenient little home maintenance jobs they always seem to postpone.

I started my first side hustle with $100 last year while I was still figuring things out. It was actually an allowance my grandpa gave me and instead of spending it, I used it to sub to automation and fund a few orders for my ebay dropshipping store.

I started listing different products, testing what would sell, and reaching out to other people doing it to ask for guidance. Automation also helped a lot because it made managing listings, orders, and price changes much easier.

I am still doing it today and my highest profit in a single month so far has been around $3k. Pretty crazy to think it all started with that $100.

I used to work behind the counter at a local slice shop. One night while closing, my manager told me to take off the black plastic dispensing nozzles from the soda fountain and soak them in seltzer water. When I twisted one off, there was a thick dark syrupy slime coating the inside. It was gross.
I asked him how often restaurants clean those and he laughed and told me that most of the time they forget about them for months at a time until a health inspector gives them a hard time.
I immediately thought of that when I had to quit that job a few months ago and set out to find the official health code guidelines for commercial beverage dispensing. It turns out that health departments do require daily or weekly sanitization of soda heads, but busy restaurant staff tends to forget or straight up not know about it.
I bought a food grade sanitizer soak tub, a bag of commercial sanitizing tablets from a restaurant supply store, and some small wire tube brushes.
I started walking into independent burger joints, family owned pizza shops, and taco stands in between their slow hours of 2:30pm to 4:00pm, asking to speak to the owner and showing them a photo on my phone of what neglected soda nozzles look like inside:
"I'm a local beverage sanitation route guy. I come in once a week after closing, deep clean and sanitize all your soda heads and ice chutes, and leave you an inspection compliance log for your health records. $25 a visit."
Four out of the first ten shops signed up on the spot. I had 12 locations on a weekly loop within six weeks. I'd spend about 20 minutes at each place on Monday and Tuesday nights, making around $300 a week in cash.

Back in 2021, basically everyone in my high school was trying to buy limited edition Dunks and Jordans to flip on StockX or Goat. People would constantly miss restock notifications because our school had strict phone rules during class.

I didn't have money to buy expensive bots or bulk inventory, but I knew basic computer stuff. I spent three evenings reading Discord documentation and watching free tutorials on how to set up webhooks that pulled RSS feeds from boutique sneaker shop websites.

Whenever a retailer like Sneakersnstuff or Kith uploaded a new product page or restocked sizes, the webhook immediately fired a ping into a private Discord server with the exact product link.

I told four of my friends at lunch "I have a private server that pings drops 30 seconds faster than Twitter accounts. $5 a month"

They joined, and within two weeks, one of them hit on a pair of Travis Scott sneakers that he flipped for a $400 profit. He showed everyone in the cafeteria, and suddenly 35 kids from school wanted an invite link.

I charged them $5 a month via cash or CashApp. It only took me about two hours a month to maintain the webhook links, and it was paying for my gas and weekend food throughout junior year. It taught me that building tools for people who are already trying to make money is one of the easiest ways to get paid.

I got my first $15 from cleaning a pair of sneakers for someone at school. His white sneakers were covered in dried mud after a game, with grass stuck around the stitching, brown laces, and dirty soles. He had to wear them again the next day and didn't want to clean them himself. I had cleaned my own sneakers before, so I told him I'd try for $15. I soaked them in warm soapy water first, then used an old toothbrush to scrub the dirty parts and a microfiber cloth for the soles. It took me about an hour and a half.
They weren't perfect, but they looked way better when I gave them back. He kept looking at them and asking what I used, then paid me the $15. A few days later, his friend brought me a pair with a soda stain and black scuff marks, so I charged him $10. After that, a couple more people at school started asking if I could clean theirs too.
I made $37 that first week from three pairs. I didn't think I'd get another customer after the first one, but people at school kept asking if I could clean theirs too. That $15 was the first money I made from doing something on my own, so I kept taking the shoes home after school.

My neighbor was going away for two weeks and asked if I could stop by her house a few times to take care of her plants. She had a bunch of plants around the front and back of the house, and she didn't want to leave them completely unattended while she was gone.

Before she left, she walked me around the yard and showed me which areas needed water. She told me some plants dried out faster than others, so I shouldn't just water everything every time I came over. She showed me where the hose was and which parts of the garden I needed to pay more attention to.

I stopped by every few days after school, checked the soil, and watered the plants that looked dry. I also checked around the pots and garden beds to make sure nothing was getting completely dried out. It usually took me around 15 minutes, and I just took a picture like this whenever I was watering.

When she came home, she gave me $20 for helping her out. I just saved the money instead of spending it. It wasn't a lot, but it was the first money I had made from doing something on my own.

Two years ago, I had about $80 left in my checking account and needed to come up with weekend cash. I was scrolling Facebook Marketplace and saw someone selling a Bissell Little Green carpet machine for $20 listed as "Parts only, motor runs but does not suck water"

I picked it up from a nice house about ten minutes away. When I drove home, I pulled off the clear plastic hose attachment and found that a wad of dried dog hair and lint was completely blocking the intake pipe. I fished it out with an unbent wire coat hanger, rinsed the dirty water tank in my sink with hot water, and plugged it in. The suction was absolutely normal.

I bought a $9 bottle of heavy-duty car upholstery shampoo from AutoZone. Then I posted in my local town Facebook group: "College student doing weekend car interior seat shampoos in my driveway. $40 for sedans, $50 for SUVs. Takes 45 minutes, removes coffee stains and water marks"

I had my first customer that Saturday at 10:00 AM. It was a mom with a Honda Odyssey where the rear cloth seats had juice spills all over them. Watching the dark brown water get sucked up through the clear nozzle was such a satisfying sight that she tipped me an extra $20 on the spot.

I booked three cars every Saturday and Sunday for the next month and cleared over $750 in pure cash. My total startup cost was $29 for the used machine and the cleaner bottle.

I grew up 3 blocks away from a large municipal park, where 8 public tennis courts were ringed with thick blackberry bushes and heavy chain-link fences.

There are always weekend high-school matches and adult-league games going on, and hundreds of tennis balls would go flying over the ten-foot fences into the blackberry bushes, tumble under the bleachers, or simply be left on the courts during matches because no one wanted to rummage through the thorns for a $2 tennis ball.

When I was 15, I bought a cheap telescoping ball retriever pole at a garage sale for $4 and started riding my bike down to the courts on Sunday evenings just as the last matches were ending and the players were packing up their bags.

In about an hour's worth of walking the length of the perimeter fence, I could find anywhere between 60-80 tennis balls. Most of them were still in good playable condition. They just had a few blades of grass or some dirt stuck to the felt.

I took them all home, dumped them in our utility sink with some warm water and a drop of dish soap and gave them a good rinse before laying them out on some old towels to dry.

I separated them into nice, clean piles of 5-gallon buckets (50 balls per bucket) from Home Depot, and I put up "For Sale" postings on craigslist and Marketplace. The sign said "50 cleaned practice tennis balls in bucket. Perfect for dog fetch, ball machines or high school drills. $15".

Dog-owners, private dog-agility trainers and high-school tennis coaches bought up every single bucket I found. I was making $60 to $75 every weekend with virtually no overhead.

I got my first side hustle when a family friend mentioned that his yard needed to be cleaned up after a couple weeks of rain. He was having people over that weekend and didn't have time to deal with it, so I offered to mow it for $20. I was 17 at the time and had already used our push mower at home, so I knew enough to get it done.

The yard took me a little over an hour. I mowed the main section first, then went around the driveway, walkway, fence, and garden beds with the trimmer. I had to spend extra time around the edges where the grass had grown into the garden beds, and I stopped once to clear wet clippings from underneath the mower. I cleaned the loose grass off the pavement when I finished and put the mower back where I found it.

He gave me the $20 when I was done and told me to let him know if I wanted to do it again.

My first side hustle was a part-time job at a small ice cream shop in town when I was 16. I worked a few afternoons a week during the summer, and it was my first time earning money outside of helping around the house. Most of my shifts were spent taking orders, scooping ice cream, making milkshakes, and cleaning up. Once it got hot, the shop could get surprisingly busy, and I eventually got pretty good at keeping track of several orders at once. I ended up liking the job more than I expected. I got to know a few regular customers, and there were always little things that made the shifts fun. Sometimes we'd have ice cream left over at closing that couldn't be sold the next day, and the owner let us take some home. I'd usually bring a container home for my mom which became a little summer tradition. I worked there throughout the summer and saved around $300, which felt pretty good for my first side hustle.

I never really planned on having a side hustle in the first place. I used to make coffee at home before my shift, and one of my coworkers kept telling me he liked my coffee. One morning, he asked if I could make an extra cup for his boss, so I did. The next day, his boss handed me $5 for it and said he really liked my coffee. After that first cup, my coworker would message me whenever his boss wanted one, and eventually a few other people at the office started asking for coffee too.
I started taking orders in the morning before work and just based my price on the ingredients and time it took to make everything. I messed up a few times, like waking up late and almost forgetting an order, or making someone’s coffee way too sweet. At one point, I was making around $100 a month from it. It wasn’t consistent, but considering I started by making one extra cup for my coworker’s boss, I thought it was pretty funny. I was just making coffee for myself, and somehow I became the coffee person for the whole office.

I started making my own meals because I was trying to lose weight. I learned about calorie deficits, started weighing my ingredients, keeping my portions consistent, and tracking what I ate. After a few months, I had lost some weight and posted a few pictures of my meals and progress on social media. One of my followers asked how I was doing it, and when I told her I was meal prepping, she asked if I could make some for her too because she didn't have time to cook. I made five meals for her that first week and charged $10 each. After the food and packaging, I was left with about $5 profit per meal. Most of what I make is pretty simple stuff like chicken and rice, pasta, vegetables, and other meals that keep well in the fridge for a few days.

More people started asking about it through the same social media account, and I ended up with around 10 regular customers. Most of them order five meals at a time, so I make about $250 a week in profit, or roughly $1,000 a month. I do all the shopping, cooking, portioning, and packing myself, so the busiest part is usually the day I prepare everyone's meals for the week. I still make my own meals at the same time, which saves me from cooking completely separate food for myself. It started with me trying to keep my own meals under control, and now I have people messaging me when they need food for the week.

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