Here's how to start your 6-figure side hustle, according to entrepreneurs who have done it
Courtesy of Annalisa Abell
- Small businesses have boomed since the start of COVID-19, earning some entrepreneurs six figures.
- Famous companies such as Apple, Twitter, and Facebook started as side projects.
- Insider gathered career advice for those who want to turn their passions into profitable businesses.
Now may be a good time to invest in a side hustle.
Side hustles became more popular during the pandemic as people sought new hobbies during lockdowns or extra income, said Luke Pardue, an economist at Gusto, a platform for small-business payroll and benefits.
In fact, 33% of the small-business owners who used Gusto said they needed side hustles to keep their companies afloat. Other experts advised that taking on a side gig during the pandemic could provide more financial security.
"The surge in side hustles is partly caused by new entrepreneurs who need to rely on additional sources of income to cover the businesses that they just started," Pardue said.
In the past, people have taken on side hustles to pay off student loans, pursue an unfulfilled passion, or become their own boss. Some of the most recognizable companies, such as Apple, Twitter, and Facebook, started as side projects and later became multibillion-dollar corporations.
Insider spoke with entrepreneurs who earn almost six figures or more about their advice on building side hustles.
Here are the side hustles that you can try now and how you can build them efficiently.
Mark Stenberg and Weng Cheong contributed to an earlier version of this story.
Natalia Zorina
Natalia Zorina is a 31-year-old Turo host in Miami who started her business with one car in 2018 as a side hustle. She eventually purchased more vehicles and in 2021 landed the first investor in her company.
Turo is a car-sharing app that allows people to rent out their cars to customers for a daily rate. Some hosts rent as a side hustle to earn passive income, while others, like Zorina, operate full-time businesses.
In 2022, Zorina earned $922,225 from renting her cars on Turo, which Insider verified with documentation. Today, she has 69 cars including a Ferrari, Porsche, Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Audi, and Lamborghini.
Crystal Warren
Vending machines can make up a lucrative business for entrepreneurs looking to earn passive income.
Crystal Warren started her vending-machine business in 2016 as a side hustle while she worked full time as a teacher. Once she began earning more from her business than her full-time job, she quit teaching to focus on her company, Vending Factory.
Now, she runs the business full time and finds locations for other entrepreneurs. In 2022, Vending Factory booked more than $242,000 in sales, which Insider verified with documentation.
Courtney Allen
Freelancing is a great way to make the most of your skills while working a regular 9-to-5, since you set your own hours and can work from anywhere.
A Statista report found that there are nearly 58 million freelance workers, and that number is expected to reach 86.5 million by 2027. Moreover, many freelancers earn more than they did when working 9-to-5 jobs.
Courtney Allen started freelancing in 2016 after a failed business attempt left her with $25,000 in credit-card debt. She previously worked at Cisco Systems as a presentation designer for senior executives, so she used her PowerPoint and graphic-design skills to branch off on her own.
Allen used the freelance platform Upwork to find clients and started with an hourly rate of $27. Today, her hourly rate is $150 in addition to some flat-rate gigs. Since 2016, Allen has earned more than $1.3 million in payments on Upwork, which Insider verified with documentation.
Courtesy of Joana Galvão
Galvão quit her job and became a full-time freelancer after discovering that clients would pay big bucks for logo designs. She charged her first client $800, and she was earning $100,000 within 10 months, she wrote in an Insider post.
In 2014, she cofounded GIF Design Studios, an award-winning design agency in Portugal. Galvão wrote that she didn't need a big audience to build her company. Instead, she emphasized in-person networking, attending conferences, and reaching out to other entrepreneurs for advice.
Similarly, Morgan Overholt, a graphic designer, wrote in an Insider post that she makes $200,000 a year using the freelance website Upwork and securing contracts she procured on her own. The 34-year-old gave a breakdown of her expenses and how she makes it work — by developing careful spending habits and investing in future growth.
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Courtesy of Annastasia Kamwithi
Quitting a full-time job to write is a lot more common than you might expect.
When Kamwithi lost her job as a banker with Co-operative Bank Ltd. in 2015, she was on the lookout for something to replace $50,000 of lost annual income. Now, she's a ghostwriter earning $80,000 a year on her own time.
The entrepreneur told Insider that good writing comes with practice. She also recommended developing a writing portfolio with your byline so that you have original samples to show clients.
"I remember when I started out I had written one personal article on entrepreneurship tips," Kamwithi said. "I had used this when I was training and just starting out, but turns out it was a great piece that got me hired by a few good clients who created for me an opportunity to launch my career as a ghostwriter."
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Courtesy of Huda Beauty
In today's day and age, becoming an influencer is recognized as a career choice. Insider has interviewed social-media stars and YouTube creators such as Kevin David and Marina Mogilko on how they leverage their online platform.
One such star, Kattan, is a self-made beauty mogul worth an estimated $610 million.
After quitting her job in finance, Kattan built her cosmetics empire of more than 40 million Instagram followers and cofounded the makeup brand Huda Beauty with her sister Mona.
When it comes to starting an influencer business, the Kattan sisters suggested straightening out legal aspects as soon as you can.
"A lot of people think good lawyers are expensive," Mona told Insider. "But bad lawyers are much more expensive in the end. Not having that right will screw you up later on."
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Courtesy of Moose Read
Read dropped out of college to pursue his side hustle full time. In an interview with Insider, he said he made $225,000 in sales in 2018 by reselling sneakers through his website, Moosetraxshop, and at shoe conventions and events.
Read, who was 20 years old at the time, warned against taking out loans to get started and recommended having at least $1,000 in savings or an emergency fund to start.
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Courtesy of Mecca Gamble
Elious, a 29-year-old who turned a college side hustle designing Myspace profiles into a full-time consulting gig, said that starting young helped her make a career transition.
In an interview with Insider, she said she was able to keep her personal expenses low by living at home or with a roommate. She based her living choices on her side hustle, and she turned it into a full-time business in five years. The entrepreneur recommended self-reflection on the level of commitment and time it takes to build something from scratch.
"Make sure that your side hustle is going to be able to pay you for the life that you want," she said. "You have to have that bold, calculated mindset to take on short-term paying for long-term gain."
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Courtesy of Shannon Welch
Insider previously spoke with Welch, a Poshmark seller who decided to turn her closet into a six-figure career.
Welch started with zero sales, and she built a customer base through understanding the websites' wholesale portal and demographic. By the time she graduated from college, the side hustler was already making more than $100,000 in sales.
"All of these entry-level positions pay — I think typical is around $50,000 a year. And I'm making more than that doing something that I love and something that I know that I'm good at," she said.
The secondhand market is currently worth $36 billion and expected to reach $77 billion by 2025, according to a ThredUp report.
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Courtesy of The Story of Ramen
Chan and Parsons set up ramen cooking classes as an Airbnb Experience in 2017, and the side hustle became so popular that Chan was able to quit his job a year later to pursue it full time, Insider previously reported.
They initially pulled 64% of his client base from Airbnb. But the entrepreneurs then created a company website that soon became the main venue for bookings. Now, 70% of their business is from corporate teams that are looking for company activities.
"A lot of companies tell me they don't have to just pick a restaurant or a bar for the team bonding because everyone will just eat and drink," Chan said previously. "They want something more engaging. Making noodles and working as a team is interactive and engaging."
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Courtesy of Stacey and Paul Martino
The Martinos decided to start a relationship-coaching side hustle after saving their own marriage from divorce.
The couple cofounded Relationship Development, a relationship-coaching side hustle that they turned into a $2 million business in 2010. They spent two years forming a business plan before officially launching the company. One thing that helped the couple grow the business significantly was online marketing.
"Understanding traffic allows you to become stable in a very unstable world," Stacey said. "We were under seven figures back then, and now we have a seven-figure, mission-based business serving a lot more people than we used to."
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Courtesy of Erica North
North, an adult-entertainment creator, said that when fans pay to subscribe to her channel, the content draws them in, but the connection keeps them paying.
North is one of many creators who have taken to sites such as OnlyFans to monetize their ability to connect with fans. North doesn't identify as a sex worker, and she makes a substantial portion of her income by charging her subscribers for the opportunity to text her.
"I tell people, 'My favorite feature on OnlyFans is talking to people,'" North told Insider. "I really mean it when I tell them that I'm there for them, I want to talk to them, and that doing so is the best part of my day."
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Courtesy of Kamil Sattar
Drop shippers use wholesale marketplaces such as AliExpress, which sells every category of product in cheap prices, to identify things that might be of interest to consumers. They advertise these products on social-media platforms and act as middlemen between the supplier and customer once the product is sold.
Sattar, who dropped out of college, sold $1.7 million worth of products through drop-shipping this year. He told Insider's Catherine LeClair that sellers should focus on selling one product and leverage other product-branding websites to legitimatize their business.
For example, he used e-commerce platform Shopify to make product websites. Sattar also relied on apps to simplify drop-shipping processes, such as automation for customer texts and emails, order-tracking for products, and video- and photo-editing for ads, he said.
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Courtesy of Amy Porterfield
Porterfield is a former content-development executive for the popular performance coach Tony Robbins, and she has since leveraged her corporate skill set to earn $13 million selling digital courses to entrepreneurs.
She recommended that side hustlers self-reflect in areas where they've gotten the most positive results. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same work you do at your job. In fact, a teachable skill can range from beating a marathon record to making a secret recipe for caramel candied apples, she said.
Using that same mindset, Porterfield found her niche and now focuses on her two programs: a $397 curriculum that teaches people how to build successful email lists and a $1,997 package on how entrepreneurs can launch a digital course teaching anything from scratch.
"You only need one or two digital courses to be successful," she said. "Just create one and validate the fact the people are buying your product, launch it again with a better marketing strategy, and launch it again."
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Courtesy of Sally Miller
Miller worked as a stay-at-home mom, life coach, business analyst, and project manager before starting her latest career as a self-published author.
She built a following through her subject matter, which focuses on how people can make money through various entrepreneurial ventures, such as Airbnb and ghostwriting.
So far, she's coauthored and published 16 books on Amazon's platform, Kindle Direct Publishing, and booked $9,000 in royalties in January, her highest amount to date, documents viewed by Insider showed.
When wading into this side hustle, Miller suggested exploring paid advertising as a way to increase sales. She buys paid advertising on Amazon for her work, budgeting about $2,500 a month for Amazon ads. She only has to pay for an ad if someone clicks on it, and it directs customers to her author page.
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Courtesy of Stormi Steele
Steele was working as a hairstylist when she started making her own hair products in her kitchen. She mixed ingredients such as flaxseed oil and vitamin E in the hopes of creating a concoction that would help her hair grow.
Today, she's the founder of Canvas Beauty Brand, a three-year-old haircare brand that made almost $20 million in sales last year, statements viewed by Insider said.
To help grow her business, she invested in paid social-media advertising — $100 got her a promotion that she shared across outlets such as Facebook and Instagram. That one ad led to nearly $15,000 in sales in a few days, and two weeks later, she sold an additional $440,000 worth of products.
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Courtesy of Vivian Nguyen
Vivian Nguyen was one of the first sellers on the live shopping app Popshop Live when it launched two years ago. Before joining the app, she was an influencer on YouTube selling "squishies," or foam toys with a viral following.
In 2020, Nguyen's business Cyndercake made more than $60,000 in sales on Popshop Live and now it's helping her pay for college. Her growth led her to open an e-commerce site this year. "When I was starting to sell, it kind of felt like a garage sale," she said. "I figured that an online shop would be a good step to officially make my mark as a business owner."
As more small businesses and resellers are using livestream shows to grow their businesses and personally connect with customers, the livestream shopping market is estimated to be worth $6 billion this year and $25 billion by 2023, according to Coresight Research.
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(Courtesy of Friday Eve Photo)
Chelsea Clarke launched her business Blogs For Sale while marketing and building websites for a brokerage that sold brick-and-mortar businesses. She applied the same concept to online businesses: By revamping a rundown blog with Google Search optimization she could turn it into an online business that generates $16,800 in a year.
Her company took off last year as more people sought online revenue streams during the pandemic. In 2020, she earned $127,000 from flipping 13 websites and brokering sales for 50 more sites, Insider verified with documentation.
Clarke said it's simple to start a business flipping websites, but it takes a lot of work and commitment. Though certification isn't required, she highly recommends getting trained and certified to boost your knowledge and credibility. She trained through the International Business Brokers Association with a program focused on selling brick-and-mortar businesses.
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Jackie Sterna
Jessica Hawks jumped from one corporate job to another before deciding to reclaim her creative side. That's when she reached out to her favorite brands and entrepreneurs on social media, asking if they needed help with content creation, business management, or backend administration.
Hawks created a business profile in March 2020, and by August, had seven consistent clients. She was also hitting $9,000 per month as a virtual assistant, quadrupling her salary as a full-time employee.
Now as a full-time virtual assistant coach, Hawks holds multiple masterclasses per year, hosts a podcast, and helps aspiring entrepreneurs start their own businesses.
Read more.
courtesy of Battan
Jim Battan was scrolling through a local social media group when he realized how many families were in search of a pool to visit. Having a pool that was rarely used by his family, he decided to offer it up as a rental.
He joined Swimply, a pool-sharing app similar to Airbnb, during the summer of 2020.
"I put it on Swimply and within two hours it had three bookings," Battan told Insider. "It has just steamrolled from there, and in the last 21 months in business, I've had almost 9,000 guests come through."
Battan earned $159,000 in revenue since opening his pool for business, according to documents previously verified by Insider.
As a serial entrepreneur, Battan said this is the perfect side hustle because it's allowed him to monetize what he already owned. But he still invests time and money into updating his property to increase his customer flow.
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