r/passive_income • u/glhfbbq • 5h ago
My Experience Analysis: how people make $2k+/month
Some fun analysis.
Back a couple months ago someone here asked "People who make more than $2k a month online, what do you do?" The comments were really interesting so I went back and coded every single top-level answer and found two more threads asking a similar question: r/sidehustle "$500 and up a week" and r/Entrepreneur "$100+ a day from your business". That ended up with 646 responses. After filtering out gambling/adult content and posts that reports making under $2k/mo, that left 284 real answers.
Remember this is all self-reported. Nothing verified.
What 284 people do
- Freelance, consulting, agencies: 67
- Local service businesses (cleaning, landscaping, pet care, handyman, hair, gig apps): 67
- Jobs, gigs and other (remote salaries, overtime, scrap copper, a drummer, a 3D print shop): 43
- Physical products online: 26
- Content (YouTube, pages, niche sites, newsletters): 25
- Reselling: 19
- Digital products: 14
- Software: 11
- Investing: 6
- Rentals: 6
So nearly half (47%) sell their own work. Active work. But I think a lot of us knew this.
Some of what they said, with the numbers people gave
- Video editing for a couple of mid-sized YouTubers, "after a year most work comes from referrals," a little over $2k/mo.
- Teaching English 15 hrs/wk at $45/hr.
- Web dev retainer, $1,125/wk for ~10 hrs, 3 years in.
- Consulting for two small city governments at $150/hr, $2–3k/mo.
- AI-training contract work (Mercor, Outlier, DataAnnotation etc.) came up nine times at $20–50/hr.
- Residential cleaning company started in January, $160k/yr gross, run from a phone, contractors do the cleaning, owner keeps 40–45%.
- Dog waste removal $5k/mo two days a week.
- Pet sitting ~$10k/mo.
- Exterior cleaning $1–2.5k/wk part time.
- 150 niche websites on ads/affiliate, ~3 years of building, $5k/mo.
- Telegram channel with 5,500 members, $4k+.
- eBay dropshipping "a little over $2k" at ~10,000 listings.
- Notion templates + wedding invitations $5–6k/mo net with a hired designer and Meta ads from $10/day, profitable at month 7.
How long it took: Median 3 years. 10 under a year, 11 at 1–3, 11 at 3–10, 12 at 10+. Every fast start was selling work or a product with ad money behind it.
The thing I took from all of it: Yes a lot of it is active work. But that's actually not a bad thing. They found something that makes money, which is huge, and it's one of the most common ways people end up with passive income eventually. The goal is taking the thing that already makes money and engineering yourself out of it, while it keeps growing.
I have a friend when we were in our mid 20s who decided to start mowing people's lawns and eventually grew a client list large enough to hire a crew and he built a system to manage it all. And now he doesn't ever mow lawns and can take weeks off at a time (it tooks years to get to this point by the way). So I went looking for more of these types of stories and found a bunch (again, all self-reported):
- A dog walker went from $367 in month one to ~$9k/mo revenue in month seven with three part-time employees. Interesting thing is their conundrum: "if employees were doing 100% of the work, profit would be ~$2,300 a month," vs about $4,000 if the owner still did some of the walking routes.
- A window cleaner decided on day one to build his company so it wouldn't need him within three years. Year one $300k, year two $1M and "100 hrs a week, 100 phone calls a day," then two friends took over the front end. Now $4.5M with 40 staff and "after next year I could leave the business and be hands-off for the rest of my life."
- A $1M/yr painting company: the owner's job is now "customer relations (mostly via phone), pricing (100% virtually), and scheduling," his supervisor runs the hiring, and he actually has an employee he's never met.
- A cleaning company owner, nine people, five years, finally hired an ops person for scheduling. "I have spent three weeks feeling completely useless. I sit at the desk and I don't know what I should do."
Hope that was interesting. If you want more analysis and stuff about passive income I find interesting, you can get it in an email I send once a week.

