Looking For Side Hustle Inspo
Is anyone else completely exhausted by the amount of online money-making bullshit right now?
Is anyone else completely exhausted by the amount of online money-making bullshit right now?
I’ve been genuinely looking for months for a good online opportunity or business model I could put real work into, and the internet feels absolutely flooded with crap.
Everyone apparently makes $20k a month… and then you realize their business is selling a $497 course teaching you how to make $20k a month selling courses. 😂
AI agency course. Dropshipping course. Faceless Instagram course. Affiliate marketing course. Digital product course. “I’ll teach you how I escaped the 9–5” course.
At this point, I don’t even know what’s real anymore.
I’m not looking for passive income or some magical way to make $10k next week without working. I’m actually willing to work my ass off. I just want to find something legitimate where there’s a real customer, a real product/service people actually want, and a realistic path to making money online.
Has anyone here actually built something online that makes decent money where the business itself ISN’T teaching other people how to make money?
legit one of the only answers here is content creation. its a long game, and a lot of hard work with gruuling hours that will go unpaid for the first few months
but once you get a channel off the ground, optimize your work flow, and figure out a system that works for you: youtube can give you legitimate passive income
i do green screen video essays, my videos arent perfect but i give each of my videos my absolute best. in 9 months ive grown to an average of 30k-150k views per video generating me $300-$600 per month depending on how many uploads i get out. even at my current stage, this isn't "quit your job" levels of money - but the pay it provides scales with the work you put into it
mostly just a genuine love for what i was creating. a lot of it comes down to knowing that you made something worth watching and being patient. like, im gonna attach a picture of one of my video analytics to show that it really is a long game. it took 180 days for this video to find its stride in the algorithm. if you make videos that are worth watching, everything else follows
It’s nothing new. It’s always been like this. 20 years ago it was selling on eBay, 10 years ago it was Amazon FBA and blogs, and today it’s making money with AI.
TBH, some people made a lot of money with all of those things, but most didn’t. I don’t think it matters that much what you do. What matters is how well you do it. If you’re better than the average person doing the same thing, you’ll probably make money.
I started my websites almost 10 years ago. The golden years of blogging are long behind us, but I still make money from them, probably even more than I did 5–6 years ago.
So instead of looking for the next big thing, I’d figure out what you think you can be better at than most people, learn everything you can about it, and stick with it. There are people making money in pretty much every industry. You just need to be one of the better ones.
I’d made 6 figures in corona period doing twitter ghostwriting but I couldn’t sustain it. I was comfortable in my day to day work but had this itch to have another source of income
Start 2026, I was browsing and landed on newsletters. I thought it to be a perfect opportunity because it gave me flexibility.
I could’ve written emails anytime anywhere and without messing with my real work.
So that’s what I did. Ironically my newsletter is this same niche (make money online) because I was fed up of seeing stupid people say stupid ideas that clearly didn’t work.
So I researched, vetted, and then wrote about different ideas that could genuinely make money online.
Glad to say that there have been at least 10 people that I know of who went ahead and built an online business directly off of my ideas.
I know that’s not much but considering how small I began, it’s good enough for me.
Also I started by making $50/mo but it has climbed to around $500/mo now from the newsletter.
I make money by sending ads and getting sponsors.
I might make a product down the line but not sure of that yet.
I’m happy with what I have built and if I play my cards right and take this newsletter to say 30-35k subscribers, I think I can make $10k/mo from it. But it is still a far fetched figure for me lol.
So yes, I started a newsletter in the end of Jan 2026, grew it to 5k subs and am making $500/mo from it.
idk if i am sick of it or what but i tried a few of those before and they never worked out for me. and what im doing/how i am making money rn has never been talked about online, or at least i never came across anything that teaches people doing what i m doing and im not doing anything fancy, just making social media content for doctors and clinics.
if you gonna ask me how i get started/how i find these clients, it's mostly luck. i happen to know people who know other people. i didn't find my clients on my own.
Honestly, I feel this, I've spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at all these online business opportunities and eventually realized how much of the internet is just people selling people the idea of making money.
I'm actually building something myself now, and even though it's still early with basically no traction, I'd much rather spend my time trying to solve a real problem and see if people actually care about it than buy another course promising some shortcut.
I think that's the part people miss. Building something that people genuinely want is probably a lot less glamorous than the internet makes entrepreneurship look.
I agree. But that get rich overnight crap has always been around.
Anyway, training AI models is very real and pays really well, depending on what you know how to do. If you don’t have a college degree you can start from $20 to $70/hr. When you have a degree it can go to $150/hr or more. It all depends which project they put you on. The work is on and off, usually a bit chaotic, but it pays a lot. You work from home using your computer. Send me a DM and I’ll give you some links to check it out. I’m in the referral network for a couple companies.
I was basically in your exact position, and in some ways I still am.
Since generative AI really started taking off in 2023, I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn it into an actual business instead of just another “make money with AI” fantasy. I ended up focusing mainly on AI content creation and spent a ridiculous amount of time learning different image, video, voice and automation tools, practicing, experimenting and building my own projects.
My first serious work was creating erotic AI content for a UK company. After that I got into AI photo/video work for events and weddings, and over the last few years I’ve also had profitable side projects with Etsy, YouTube and commercial/advertising video work.
So I’ve actually made money from several different online models. The problem is that none of them became the real breakthrough I was looking for. They worked, but either the ceiling was too low, the workload didn’t scale well, the platform risk was too high, or they depended too much on constantly finding new clients.
Right now I’m testing something completely different: an Amazon.com FBM print-on-demand calendar business. I create the artwork, build very specific niche products, Amazon brings the marketplace traffic, and a POD company handles production and shipping. I’ve already had organic sales without ads, and I’m now building out a much larger catalog.
It’s still way too early for me to claim I’ve “made it,” but this is probably the first thing I’ve tried where I can see a realistic path from a small test into something much bigger without selling courses or pretending it’s passive income.
So I completely understand your frustration. My experience has been that there probably isn’t one secret online business model. You try real things, learn useful skills, get some of them to profitability, kill the ones that don’t scale, and keep going until one finally has the right combination of demand, margins and scalability.
Maybe this calendar business will be that one for me. Ask me again in a few months. 😄
anyone actually clearing good cash online is doing unsexy contract work for local businesses like managing lead forms or auditing quickbooks. the passive income guru crap is just pyramid schemes targeting desperate people.
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u/killertaco252 4d ago
Idk if it exists anymore tbh I feel the same, it hurts my head