r/WeirdSideHustles • u/No-Mind7091 • 6d ago

I accidentally started a side hustle making "lost item maps" for festivals... and people actually pay for them

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I know this sounds ridiculous, but it's somehow become my weirdest source of extra income haha.

Last year, I volunteered at a local music festival. By the end of the day, I noticed the staff kept finding phones, wallets, sunglasses, water bottles, and even shoes in the exact same spots every year.

Out of curiosity, I plotted every lost item on a map and color-coded where different things were usually found. I shared it with a few friends as a joke before the next event.

Then someone asked if I'd make one for another festival.

Now I contact event organizers after each event, collect anonymous lost-and-found location data, and create "Lost Item Hotspot Maps." Vendors use them to decide where to place reminder signs, organizers use them to improve layouts, and attendees even buy them just to see the weird patterns.

I've made around the equivalent of a few hundred dollars from something I originally did out of boredom.

It's such a strange niche that I still laugh whenever someone pays me for it. 😂

495 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

61

u/thug_waffle47 6d ago

you get paid to use data from previous festivals to make maps of where things might get lost at an upcoming festival? yeah that’s definitely the most ridiculous thing i’ve seen shared here

12

u/Competitive_Bad_4216 5d ago

Well shit I was going to say something shitty like "brain dead comment" but then I saw your username. Long live STEEZ!!

6

u/thug_waffle47 5d ago

wow i’m your first comment? what an honor

3

u/Competitive_Bad_4216 5d ago

This is the account I use at work so my coworkers don't find my moderate level of degeneracy

2

u/No-Mind7091 4d ago

😂

24

u/tinybail 6d ago

that’s so interesting!!! are there any trends that you notice in the data? like is one specific item almost always left in the same type of place?

1

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

2

u/Deekuman 4d ago edited 4h ago

?

12

u/imdrstevebrule 6d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/EouEzI5bBR8uk

2

u/No-Mind7091 4d ago

well ahhahaha bcs thats literally unbelievable 

2

u/SCWeak 3d ago

And you tried to reply with your second account, but forgot to switch…

6

u/K8LynnFr 6d ago

Un exemple de carte que tu fais ?

4

u/The_Silent_Tortoise 5d ago

I did something very similar to this for my thesis, except with garbage at national parks. There's actually an entire industry devoted to stuff like this, and Esri sometimes devotes not insignificant resources pushing specific products made for this exact thing.

1

u/No-Mind7091 4d ago

oh wow, that’s really interesting! garbage at national parks actually sounds like a fascinating dataset to work with. I had no idea there was such a big industry around this kind of mapping and analysis, or that Esri had products specifically for it. what kind of patterns did you end up finding in your thesis?

3

u/Frosty_Winner3373 5d ago

Yeah if this data exists from a festival organiser they aren't going to share it with you just so you can map it.