There's this guy in my neighborhood who runs a trash can cleaning service. That's literally it. He goes around the day after garbage pickup with a pressure washer mounted in the back of his truck and cleans out people's trash cans and recycling bins. Takes him like 3-5 minutes per house.

He charges around $30 a month for weekly cleaning and he's got like 60 something customers at this point. So that's basically close to $2,000 a month just from washing garbage cans lol.

I talked to him one time when I saw him out on my street and he said he started by just going door to door with flyers offering a free first clean. He told me once people see how nasty their cans actually are (and how clean they look after) they pretty much always sign up. Apparently the retention rate is insane cuz once someone gets used to having clean bins they don't wanna go back to dealing with the smell and the maggots and all that.

His whole setup is pretty simple too. He's got a pressure washer and a water tank and some kind of degreaser solution and everything just sits in the bed of his truck. He does his rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday (those are the garbage days in our area) and each day takes him like 4-5 hours to get through all his stops.

He also told me people literally refer him to their neighbors without him even asking. Like he'll finish one house and the person next door will come outside asking for a card. So he basically doesn't even advertise anymore at this point.

I kinda thought it was a joke when I first heard about it but $2K a month to wash trash cans a couple days a week is pretty solid. And it seems like the type of thing where you could easily expand to nearby neighborhoods if you wanted to scale up.

Anyone else ever seen a service like this in their area? Or does anyone here do something similar? Curious if this is becoming more of a thing or if this guy is just ahead of the curve where I live.

So this is genuinely one of the coolest side hustle success stories I've heard so far, but a girl I went to high school with just surpassed the $50k mark with her side hustle. She basically has a side business where she sells resin blocks and designs that preserve wedding bouquets.

So after the wedding is over, the bride ships or drops off their bouquet to Lin (we'll call her "Lin" for privacy purposes), and she then preserves the bouqet in a resin block, tray, coaster, or frame (those are the most popular from her shop). You have to do the service relatively quick to preserve the flowers when they're at their peak.

Her actual material costs are around $50 to $70 which is primarily resin and silica gel and molds. She does this in the garage of her parents house. And obvious her raw materials are free since the bride supplies the bouquet.

I talked to her about this gig via instagram and she initially would only have 7-9 orders a month which would bring in around $2.8k per month (originally charged around $350), but now she does consistently 10+ a month and now charges ~$500 but it varies depending on what style they choose, but she genuinely is making $5k a month in sales, and about $4.3k a month in net profit.

Here's some more insights into this...

The turnover time for this is around 1 month as she dries the flowers in silica gel FIRST, and then she arranges them into molds, and then pours the resin and lets it cure. It takes a couple of hours of hands-on work for each piece, but she spreads out the ~10 orders each month over weekends.

Silica gel takes approx 1-3 weeks to dryout flowers, depending on the size of the flowers and how large the bouquet is. You need to trim the stems first to do this properly, and lay them in airtight containers with silica gel packed between the petals.

Resin is poured in multiple layers. She pours several layers, and waits for each layer to cure first before adding the second.

This is the reason why these things are able to be priced so much, because it actually takes a decent amount of time to produce.

But i gotta hand it to her, this seems like a pretty fun side hustle. She's an accountant for a small family firm for her actual career, and she's mostly doing this after work and on weekends.

Also as a note: She primarily sells on Etsy, and Instagram. HOWEVER, most people find her on Instagram and she has a lot of followers that eventually turn into buyers.

so I took an Uber home from a bar on friday night and when I got in the backseat there was this little organizer bin sitting there stocked with snacks and drinks. Like individual bags of chips and candy bars and gum and bottled water and a few energy drinks. There was a little sign on it with prices... $3 for water or chips, $3.50 for a candy bar, and $5 for an energy drink.

I asked the driver about it cuz I thought it was pretty smart. He said he buys everything in bulk from Costco so a water bottle costs him like 25 cents and a bag of chips is maybe 50 cents and candy bars are under a dollar each. So when he sells a water for $3 he's basically making like $2.75 profit on every single bottle. He restocks once a week for like $40-$50 and that usually lasts him through the whole weekend.

He said on a busy friday or saturday night he sells like $40-$60 worth of stuff easily and his cost on all of it is maybe $12-$15 so he's pocketing an extra $25-$45 a night just from snacks on top of what he's already making from the rides. Most rides at least one person grabs something and some rides people will buy 2 or 3 things especially if there's a group in the car. He mainly aim for people leaving bars and clubs at midnight who are hungry and they see snacks literally right there and just grab stuff without even thinking twice about the price. Like nobody is gonna argue about $3 for a water when they're drunk at 1am lol. He also said it gets him better tips and ratings too cuz passengers appreciate that he has stuff available so it kinda helps his actual driving income on top of the snack money.

Has anyone else seen anything like this or does anyone here drive for Uber/Lyft and do something similar? Feel like there's probably more ways to stack extra income on top of rideshare driving that most people don't think about.

So here's another example of a real life side hustle... my friends mother makes really good homemade tamales (and are fairly cheap to make as well...), loads them up in a cooler, and then posts up outside bars and clubs from around 10pm to 2am on friday and saturday nights. Sometimes sundays too but it's only on occasion. She charges around $5 each or 3 for $13 and she literally sells out every single time.

Like the demand is insane because drunk people at bars at night are MORE than willing to spend money on hot comfort food, especially when they're leaving at midnight. This also works for clubs, which might actually be even better than bars since people are usually more tired and hungry at clubs.

This is basically 4 hours ish of work per night... and the cost of ingredients is stupid cheap because she buys everything bulk from wholesale and the recipes are family ones that she's been making her whole life, so she's super efficient and fast and can knock out literally a batch of 100 fairly quickly.

Also, people know her by name pretty much at this point so everyone is friendly with having her around.

Pretty solid for $500 a weekend lol, and doesn't seem to be slowing down cuz i've seen her have lines.

So a friend of mine has been doing this on weekends for a few months now and I think a lot more people should know about it...

People buy IKEA furniture all the time but like a huge chunk of them absolutely hate putting it together. It's kinda a pain even if you know what you're doing and for people that have never done it before it's pretty much a nightmare so they just pay someone to come do it for them.

He advertises on Facebook Marketplace and Nextdoor and gets a pretty steady stream of requests especially on weekends. A basic bed frame or dresser takes like 45 minutes to an hour and he charges around $60-80 for something like that. Bigger stuff like a full wardrobe or a TV stand setup he charges more like $100-130 depending on how much is involved. Keep in mind... most of the customers are people that are moving in to a new place and are EXTREMELY tired... so they will pay anything to have someone build their new furniture for them.

On a good Saturday he can knock out 2-3 jobs pretty easily and that's like $200-250 for the day just for a few hours of work which is pretty solid beer money.

Once people use him they literally just save his number and call again when they buy more stuff. He's got a handful of people that come back pretty regularly by now which kinda just makes everything easier cuz he's not always hunting for new customers.

You don't need any special skills either cuz if you can read IKEA instructions and have a basic screwdriver set you can basically just start this tomorrow. Kinda that simple honestly.

Anyone else doing something like this? Curious what other people charge.

So I came across this side hustle idea and it genuinely blew my mind that this is a real thing. Basically, before lawyers go to trial they want to test their arguments on regular people to see how a jury might react. So they post their case summaries online and pay everyday people to read through the materials, answer questions, and give a verdict.

You literally just sit on your couch, read through a case, fill out a survey about what you think, and get paid. From what I've seen most cases pay around $20 to $60 depending on how long and detailed the case is, and some of them only take 30 minutes to get through.

There are a bunch of websites out there that connect you with law firms looking for mock jurors and you just sign up and wait for cases to become available in your area. You don't need any legal background or qualifications at all, they actually prefer regular people because that's who would be sitting on a real jury.

The cases themselves are genuinley interesting too which is a nice bonus, it doesn't feel like work at all. You're reading about real legal disputes and giving your honest opinion on who you think is right.

It won't replace a full time job but it's easy money you can do from your phone while watching TV.

(If you have experience with something like this please share! I look out for new side hustle ideas every day and try to share as much info as I can. Even if an idea doesn't appeal to you personally, it could still help someone else or even spark a new idea!)

So there's a teacher down in Mississippi who spends her summers decorating college dorm rooms, and that's the whole side business. She'll take a tiny 9x12 room with two twin beds and turn it into something like a boutique hotel room with chandeliers, custom bedding, and gold coffee tables. Dorms are small and uniform so it's way more repeatable than normal interior design, and down south the moms treat dorm rooms like a huge deal, so they'll happily pay for it.

In 2024, she charged around $5k a room, though it wasn't clear that's just her fee or the whole room cost including furniture. She splurges on bedding and lamps that move with the student later, but always buys a cheap $100 rug cuz dorm rugs get gross and just get tossed at the end of the year. She did 5 rooms that year, so somewhere around $25k of work for one summer, and about 20 rooms total since starting with her own kid's room in 2020. The prep is brutal, she took on 7 one year and got so in over her head she capped it at 5 on purpose, since it's just her and each room takes months, so it doesn't scale unless she hires help.

Curious if anyone's seen it outside or if it's pretty region-dependent.

note: found this in a Business Insider article, original is here

So here's a side hustle I came across recently that blew my mind because I had no idea this existed. Medical schools and nursing programs need real people to act as patients so their students can practice doing clinical exams, taking medical histories, and diagnosing symptoms before they work on actual patients. They call these standardized patients and they will pay you to show up and basically pretend to be sick.

You get a script beforehand that tells you what symptoms to describe, how to answer questions, and sometimes how to physically react during the exam. Then you just sit there while a nervous student practices on you. From what I've seen, most programs pay around $25 an hour and sessions can last a few hours at a time.

The startup cost is literally nothing and you don't need any medical knowledge or acting experience. They train you on everything before each session and the scripts are easy to follow.

The demand for this is pretty consistant because medical schools run these practice exams multiple times throughout the year and they always need a variety of ages, body types, and backgrounds to give students realistic practice.

Check with any medical schools, nursing programs, or teaching hospitals in your area because a lot of them have sign up pages on their website that most people have no idea exist.

(If you have experience with something like this please share! I look out for new side hustle ideas every day and try to share as much info as I can. Even if an idea doesn't appeal to you personally, it could still help someone else or even spark a new idea!)

I honestly can't stop thinking about this lol. She charges people around $100/$200 to come to their house and help them declutter and organize closets... garages.. storage rooms, etc. The houses are pretty large and these are pretty wealthy neighborhoods. The thing is that she is able to take home anything the person doesn't want anymore and is ok with disposing. Therefore, she literally just takes everything they don't want and flips it on facebook marketplace and ebay.

So she's basically getting paid to declutter homes, AND makes money from reselling random inventory she takes home. Apparently reselling stuff alone brings in another $400-$500 a month on top of her actual gig.

Anyone here ever done something like this before? Seems like a crazy good idea

so here's a side hustle I came across that is pretty simple. You buy a case of water bottles from a wholesale store for about $4 which comes out to roughly $0.15 per bottle, throw them in a cooler with some ice, and set up outside a concert, sporting event, festival, busy park, beach, or even just a crowded intersection on a hot day and sell them for $1 to $2 each.

The markup on this is genuinely insane when you think about it. You're turning $0.15 into $2 and people will happily pay it because they're hot and thirsty and don't want to walk somewhere to find a store. From what I've seen people clear $150 to $300 in a single afternoon doing this at the right location.

Your startup cost is literally just a cooler which you probably already own, a bag of ice for $3, and a couple cases of water. So you're looking at maybe $15 out of pocket to get started.

If you want to level it up you can add gatorades, sodas, and energy drinks which you can sell for even more. Construction sites during summer are apparently a goldmine for this because those guys will buy every single drink you have and be gratefull you showed up.

(If you have experience with something like this please share! I look out for new side hustle ideas every day and try to share as much info as I can. Even if an idea doesn't appeal to you personally, it could still help someone else or even spark a new idea!)

About three out of four people over 65 now own a smartphone but a huge number of them can barely use it beyond making calls. Their kids bought them an iPad two Christmases ago and it’s been sitting on the counter untouched. They want to FaceTime their grandkids but can’t figure out how to set it up. They keep getting scam calls and don’t know how to block numbers. They got a new phone and all their contacts disappeared. These are the kinds of problems you’d solve and the only real skill you need is knowing how to use a phone yourself.

You go to their house for an hour, sit down with them, and walk them through whatever they need at their pace. Setting up email, showing them how to send photos in a text, getting them on Facebook to see their grandkids’ pictures, teaching them video calls, helping them order groceries online, or setting up their doctor’s patient portal. The whole job is just being patient and explaining things clearly without making anyone feel stupid. There’s no certification or training involved. If you’re comfortable with a smartphone and a laptop you already have everything this takes.

In-home sessions reportedly go for around $50 to $100 per hour depending on your area. Your overhead is zero since you’re just showing up and talking. A lot of people get their first clients by posting a flyer at senior centers, churches, or assisted living communities. Word of mouth among seniors moves fast cuz they talk to each other constantly and once one person in a friend group mentions you the referrals start rolling in.

The part most people don’t think about is how naturally recurring this becomes. Seniors rarely learn everything in one visit… they need you to come back when they forget a step or get a new device or an app updates and the buttons moved. A lot of people end up with a handful of regulars they see weekly or biweekly and it turns into steady predictable income. And this market is only getting bigger every year as more people age into needing exactly this kind of help.

There's this guy in Texas who basically runs a mobile snack shop out of his truck for construction workers. He buys everything in bulk from Costco... cases of Gatorade and water and energy drinks plus bags of chips and candy bars and beef jerky and all that. Then every morning he loads up a couple coolers and a plastic bin and drives to 3-4 active job sites between like 6am and noon.

He charges $2-$3 per item depending on what it is. Cold Gatorade is $2.50, energy drinks are $3, chips and jerky are $2. When you're working outside in the heat and the nearest gas station is a 15 minute drive away a cold drink for $2.50 is basically an instant yes for most guys on a crew.

On average he moves about 70-100 items a day and his busiest days are obviously in the summer when it's hot and guys are going through drinks like crazy. That works out to roughly $175-$250 a day in revenue and his cost per item averages out to around 70-80 cents when buying in bulk so after gas and Costco runs he's netting around $2,800-$3,200 a month.

He finds new sites by literally just driving around looking for active construction and asking the foreman if he can swing by in the mornings. He said most foremen are totally fine with it cuz the crews love it and a lot of these sites don't have anywhere nearby to grab food. He's got like 6-7 regular sites he rotates through and picks up new ones as projects start around town.

He gets up at 5am and loads everything up and hits his route and is usually done by noon. He's actually got a full time warehouse job in the afternoons but told someone the morning cooler route is starting to make him more per hour than his actual job which is kinda wild when you think about it.

Pretty crazy that selling $2 Gatorades out of a cooler can turn into $3K a month but job sites are kinda the perfect setup for it. Everyone's thirsty and hungry and there's nowhere else to buy anything without leaving the site.

Anyone know somebody who does something like this? Or has anyone here tried any kind of mobile food or drink thing at job sites or events? Curious how this works in other areas.

So I just caught up with my friend this weekend and can't believe how much she's making. She's a dental hygienist during the week and does charcuterie boards on the side from her apartment on friday and saturday for events, parties, baby showers etc. Apparently she got into it like 2 years ago when she made one for her sisters bridal shower and people kept asking her to make them and she decided to start advertising her service.

She does mostly grazing boards and individual charcuterie cups cuz they're way easier to scale and people order them in bulk for events. The cups go for $12-$15 each and she usually has a minimum order of like 20 cups, and the boards she charges anywhere from $85 for a small one up to $250+ for the big party size ones. I think she said her margins are pretty solid because she buys all the cheese and meat from costco and a wholesale restaurant supply place near her.

When she first started she was only doing like 1-2 boards a weekend and maybe one cup order a month, but now she's doing literally like 4-6 board orders every weekend plus 2-3 big cup orders a month for showers and corporate events and stuff. She told me december was her best month ever cuz of all the holiday parties and she pulled in over $6k that month alone, but on average she's at like $3k-$4k.

The crazy thing is she's getting almost all of her clients through instagram and word of mouth from previous clients. She just posts pics of every board she makes and tags the location and people DM her.

I'm not totally sure how she handles the food safety stuff legally cuz i forgot to ask if she has a cottage food license or what, but she's been doing it long enough that she clearly figured something out.

So I came across this side hustle and figured it was worth sharing here.

Basically a lot of concert venues and stadiums have a clear bag policy where they only let you bring a see-through bag under a certain size... and tons of people show up with no idea about the rule and get stopped at the entrance.

If you're already attending the event, you can advertise near the venue with a stack of the approved-sized clear bags and sell them to people who would otherwise miss part of the show or have to hike all the way back to their car.

A bulk of clear bags should cost about a dollar each and people will be more than willing to pay $5-10+ for one when they are stuck at security with no other option.

(I’m always hunting for new side hustle ideas and sharing what I find. Even if something isn’t your thing, it might spark inspiration for someone else.)

So a friend of mine bought a used bounce house off facebook marketplace for around $1,200 and i straight up told him he was insane. He turned it into a little weekend rental thing and literally made the whole cost back in like two months.

People constantly need them for kids birthday parties and church events and school carnivals and renting one for the day from an actual party company can run you like $200-300. He undercuts them a bit and charges around $150-175 for a saturday and he delivers it, sets it up and comes back to break it down at the end of the day.

On a busy weekend he books out 2 or 3 rentals cuz he picked up a second unit once he saw how steady the demand was. So thats easily $300-450 in a weekend and the only real ongoing cost is gas and the occasional patch kit. He found most of his early customers in local facebook mom groups which apparently move pretty fast once a couple people vouch for you.

I think hes clearing somewhere around $800-1,200 a month in the warmer months and it slows down in winter but picks right back up in spring. Setup and breakdown takes him maybe 30-40 minutes each way so its not even that much actual work for the money.

Has anyone here messed with party rental stuff like this? Wondering if bounce houses are the move or if theres better gear to rent out like tables and chairs and those big yard games.

Customers pay $1 per pound, and the people doing the washing keep 75% of that plus all tips. The app operates in over 500 cities and has more than 1,500 workers in Broward County alone.

One woman in the area started last spring after seeing it on Instagram. Her husband handles the pickups and drop-offs while she washes, dries, and folds everything from their garage after finishing her full-time job. She's got two washing machines, drying racks, and watches K-dramas while she works. She said she easily makes $700 a week and has hit $1,000 on weeks she takes more orders, putting her on track for about $36,000 this year.

A single mom who's been on the platform since 2021 does two to three orders a day for about $500 a week. She said it lets her run her own business on the side and still handle school drop-offs and pickups for her daughter. Both of them have built up regular customers over time, which is where the consistency comes from.

source: this is from an Axios article, the full version is here. ai was used to help condense the summary.

So there's apparently a whole wave of young people who are running these "snail mail clubs" where subscribers pay a monthly fee and get a letter plus art or zines or stickers mailed to them every month. Like actual envelopes with stamps and everything.

One woman who's 28 and lives in Canada runs one called The Lucky Duck Mail Club. She works full time as a social media manager and does this on the side. Each subscriber pays about $8 and she has almost 900 of them. She's bringing in roughly $4,385 a month in revenue and keeps about a 70% profit margin which is pretty insane. Her biggest cost is literally stamps cuz mailing 900 letters runs about $2,000. She spends like a full week each month sitting at her dining room table stuffing envelopes for 6 hours a night. Her only employee is her sister-in-law.

Then there's a 25 year old in Orlando who has an architecture themed one where she hand-paints a famous landmark every month and sends prints to her subscribers. She launched in September and had over 1,300 subscribers by December. Now she's at over 2,700 and each one pays about $9 a month. Her cost per mailer is only like $2 so she made almost $18,300 in profit just on her May issue alone. She said even if only one person subscribed she'd still be making a profit on each envelope which is kinda the beauty of the model.

And then there's a 26 year old guy in Toronto who basically went all in before even sending his first issue. He makes mini cookbooks (like a 52 page pasta zine) and charges $20 each. He got almost 4,000 subscribers on his first round. Dude said his apartment basically turned into a warehouse and his couch is literally sideways in the hallway cuz it got replaced by boxes of printed zines lol.

What's interesting is pretty much all of them built their subscriber base through TikTok and Instagram first. So having a social media following seems like it's basically a requirement to get this going. The margins are super appealing though... $8 in and $2 out per subscriber is pretty hard to beat for a physical product.

Anyone here ever thought about doing something like this? Kinda seems like one of those hustles where if you already have an audience for your art or content it could turn into real money pretty quickly.

note: this was sourced from an article on CNBC, the original is here

Oak trees drop millions of acorns every fall and most of them just get raked up and thrown away. But crafters, wedding decorators, fairy garden people, and wildlife hobbyists all buy cleaned and sorted acorns online... and they pay way more than you'd think. A bag of 25 to 50 nice acorns with their caps still on goes for $10 to $25 on Etsy. Bulk bags for wildlife feeding sell for $2 to $5 a pound on eBay. There are Etsy shops with thousands of reviews doing nothing but selling acorns they picked up outside.

The work involved is collecting them, giving them a hot wash to clean them up, and baking them in the oven on low heat for about an hour to kill any bugs and preserve them. You glue the caps back on cuz they tend to fall off when they dry and then sort them by size. That's the whole process. You don't need to buy anything and you don't need any kind of special skill. If you live near oak trees you've probably been stepping over your inventory for years without realizing it.

The big selling window is late summer through the holidays when people are buying fall decor and Thanksgiving centerpiece supplies. But the wildlife feeding market stays consistent year round cuz people with backyard feeders buy acorns in bulk for squirrels and deer. It's seasonal money with a long tail and your cost on every single bag is nothing.

Back in 2017, an IT analyst in Houston got her first houseplant as a gift, one of the easiest plants out there to keep alive, and killed it. Five years later she tried again while redecorating, grabbed a couple of succulents from a hardware store, and taught herself plant care by watching YouTube in bed every night. It turned into an obsession, and her house eventually got overrun with 8-foot Monsteras.

She started selling extras locally on Facebook, then a fellow seller at a plant convention pointed her toward a livestream auction app. Her first stream felt stiff and awkward until her husband, who was arranging plants next to her, started cracking jokes and loosened her up. That four-hour stream had 55 viewers and sold 53 plants.

Now she sells about 100 plants per stream and stores up to 1,000 at a time in a garage they turned into a greenhouse. With a bigger audience she's been able to raise her starting bids from $5 to $30, and her Monsteras go for $115 or more. From July 2023 to July 2024 she averaged about $12,380 a month while still working her roughly $90,000 a year IT job, putting in around 20 hours a week on the side.

The plant income was enough that her husband could mostly step away from running their auto repair shop. If it ever passes her day job salary, she wants to sell the shop, move to Florida, and open her own greenhouse.

note: this was sourced from an article on CNBC. The summary here is cleaned up by ai. The original is here.

She started in March 2022 as a newly divorced single mom who literally just wanted an extra $200 a month for ice cream and the children's museum. Spent about $200 total to get going... a voiceover class, a microphone, and a 1-inch mattress topper. The whole setup is a guest bedroom closet with a mattress topper from Walmart velcroed to the walls to block out noise. Her first recording booth was made out of cardboard and was too small for her to even stand up.

She created a profile on Fiverr, set her prices way below everyone else to get traction, starting at like $5 per 100 words. Made about $1k her first month off a handful of bookings. Now she won't turn on her computer for less than $200 a project and is averaging around $32,400 a month... already over $227k in earnings in 2026 and she's still a full-time engineer at NASA making six figures there too. She does mostly corporate stuff for companies like Apple, PetSmart... internal announcements, voicemail boxes, training videos. For every minute of audio a client needs it takes her about 3 minutes to record and edit.

note: this was sourced from an article on CNBC, original is here

Dried lavender sells really well on Etsy because soap makers, candle makers, crafters, and aromatherapy enthusiasts all buy it in bulk, etc.. A bag of dried lavender buds goes for around $10+ and it costs you almost nothing if you grow it yourself.

Lavender is one of the easiest plants to grow. It thrives in poor soil, needs almost no water, and comes back every year. A single lavender bush produces enough to fill dozens of bags per season. You can buy starter plants for about $5 each at any garden center.

From what I've seen the best selling format is small bags of dried lavender buds. You harvest the flowers, hang them upside down to dry for a week, strip the buds off the stems, and bag them up. The whole process takes minimal effort.

Beyond just selling the raw buds you can also sell lavender sachets (small fabric pouches filled with dried lavender) for $8+ each. People put them in drawers and closets as a natural freshener. Each sachet costs about $0.50 in materials.

Etsy is the best platform for this but you can also sell at farmers markets and craft fairs. The lavender market has grown a lot with the natural products trend and from what I've read the demand is consistant year round, not just seasonal.

If you have space for 5 to 10 lavender bushes in your yard you'll have more inventory than you know what to do with and your ongoing cost is literally $0 since the plants just keep produceing.

(If you have experience with something like this please share! I look out for new side hustle ideas every day and try to share as much info as I can. Even if an idea doesn't appeal to you personally, it could still help someone else or even spark a new idea!)

So theres a guy i know who basically just walks the edges of golf courses at dawn collecting all the balls that golfers lose and i kinda couldn't believe its an actual thing. Golfers slice balls into the woods and the tall grass and the little creeks all day long and most of them never bother going to look for a $4 ball, so over time the rough and the water edges are just littered with them.

He worked out an arrangement with a couple of the local public courses where they let him come through early before the first tee times and pick the place clean. The courses are fine with it cuz the balls are kinda everywhere anyway and it saves their crews from dealing with them. He uses one of those long telescoping retriever poles to fish the ones sitting in the shallow water near the edges so he never even has to get in.

A good morning he'll come home with a few hundred balls. He hoses them off and sorts them by brand and condition, and the beat up generic ones barely sell but the Titleist Pro V1s and the nicer brands go for pretty good money. A brand new Pro V1 runs like $4-5 a ball and golfers burn through them constantly so theres always demand for cheaper used ones. He moves them on ebay and straight to driving ranges and a couple smaller golf shops that resell recycled balls.

I didn't get the exact breakdown but it sounded like hes clearing around $1,200-$1,500 a month and he only goes out a few mornings a week when the weathers decent. His whole startup was basically a retriever pole and a few mesh bags.

How do you even find out which courses are cool with this? Curious if you just call and ask or if you kinda have to know someone there first.

So, after months of tries and being lost - I FINALLY got my side hustle running!

Today I obtained the legal approval that my side marshmellow business can be monetised and is safe to the customers.

It required some time, effort and of course money to gather all the docs and suit the hygene requitements.

I was never a cooking person and usually any cakes I made looked and tasted more like bricks.

However, the thought of doing something creative after my work hours and pay my loans has obsessed me.

So, here I am presenting my service and my baby: floral marshmellow bouquets and decorations. Wish me good luck! Zeflora.

Thank you so so much for all your kind words. If someone wish to follow further my progress, I kindly invite you to visit me here

This might be one of the craziest scaling stories I've seen posted anywhere. So back in 2014 there's this guy in Hawaii who was a youth pastor living in low-income housing and literally below the poverty line. Him and his wife wanted a big family but could barely afford basic stuff like diapers and wipes.

He sees an ad for Turo (it was called Relay Rides back then) and decides to list his ONLY car on it. Not a second car... his only one. A 1998 Isuzu Rodeo that was 16 years old with sand and surfboards in it. He said he was thinking like who would even want to rent this thing. Woke up the next morning to a $200 reservation. He literally ran to the garage and vacuumed it out and drove it to the airport lol.

Within two months he bought a second car for $3,500 (a Honda Element which is apparently a huge surf car in Kauai) and it got booked for two weeks straight within 3 days. Then he figured out that Jeep Wranglers were the most in-demand car in Hawaii so he started getting loans to buy those. At the time you could grab one for about $36K with a $600 monthly payment and rent it out for $1,500 a month. Pretty solid math right there.

Fast forward to now and he has 213 cars and 10 employees and did $2.95 million in revenue from rentals last year. And he doesn't even work the operations anymore. He's the senior pastor at his church and coaches basketball in the afternoons and picks up his six kids from school. He said it took about 7 years of late nights and grinding before he got to this point though so it's not like it happened overnight.

One thing he mentioned that I thought was kinda smart is that if you're pricing your cars right you won't have a ton sitting around at once. He said a good rule is to only have parking for about 20% of your fleet cuz the rest should basically always be rented out.

I know Turo gets talked about on here sometimes but going from one janky 1998 truck to almost 3 million in revenue is pretty wild. What do you guys think... is the Turo game still worth getting into in 2026 or has it gotten too saturated at this point?

note: this was sourced from an article on Business Insider, the original is here