I Tried 5 Side Hustles to See If They Actually Make Money

Cash reigns supreme. We can’t escape it. We can’t beat it. And the internet has opened up even more avenues for building personal wealth, promising that even a trip to the toilet can double up as a chance to accrue money. My social media feeds are crammed with alluring stories of people “just like me” who quit their nine-to-five to become a full-time Rich Person. How did they do it, you ask? Side hustles, baby! 

But how exactly did these 21-year-olds go from living at home to living it large? We know influencers dwell in a hazy world of smoke and mirrors, with flashy IG snaps of “Lambo lyf” acting as bait for their actual income stream: financial tutorials, bought by naive followers. 

Still, side hustle videos continue to get millions of views. That begs the question: Are there an uncountable number of secret young millionaires who’ve profited from these tips or are digital ventures just bullshit? I tried some of the most popular ones to find out. 

According to TikToker @vivianshustle, becoming someone’s text buddy on Fiverr, the platform for freelance services, is the digital money-maker we’ve all been sleeping on. “This is not just a side hustle, this is something you can actually turn into a business,” she says. According to the video, you can even make £27 every half hour. Not bad. 

I’ve got WhatsApp messages from 2022 that still need a reply, but my thumbs can work at lightning speed if money is involved. ‘This will be easy,’ I thought. 

The first thing that becomes apparent is just how laborious making a profile is, with a 500-character minimum for questions like “describe yourself”. ‘Who am I,’ I wonder. I write: “I am a writer.” The platform offered me a seller profile, and I immediately create a gig as “the best online friend you’ll ever have”. It all felt too easy.

Fiverr begged to differ. Within hours, I get two devastating emails: 1) “Your gig has been removed.” 2) “Your seller profile has been removed”. Apparently the quality of my seller profile is “not good enough”. Every shred of confidence flees my body.

Ease to carry out: 1/10
Money made: £0

I struggled to move past my last failure, but my dream of becoming a private jet-flying girlboss prevails. According to Taylor Couch (AKA @buildwealthfromhome2), selling a digital planner on Etsy was is digital side-hustle she wished she knew sooner. “This one’s for the broke and lazy,” she promises in her TikTok. Incredible: Who wouldn’t want the idle person’s approach to getting mega-rich? Couch says that you can download a free planner template off a site, create a listing on Etsy and sell said item for nearly 100 percent profit.

This side hustle isn’t nearly as easy as her minute-long video suggested. She progresses through the steps like a natural, but I have several questions. Like: How do you find images of the item to add into the listing? Why wouldn’t someone just download a free app, rather than a random PDF of a page from Etsy? 

Frustration starts to boil in my stomach. How the hell was this the “broke and lazy edition” of hustling? I eventually get there, but the fruits of my labour sour my mood even further: My digital planner is hideous. I can’t imagine a living soul on this planet who would be compelled to buy it, but I put it up for sale anyway. A quick scroll through Etsy reveals dozens of people doing the exact same thing as me, and their planners are marginally nicer. This is reflected in the zero sales I receive over the next week. 

Ease to carry out: 6/10
Money made: £0

By this point, side hustling feels nothing short of confusing and exhausting. But CEOs weren’t born overnight, right? My next business idea came from TikToker @digitalprofiting, who claims he has “the easiest side hustle that required only 30 minutes a day”.

“This is the most simple side hustle to get started on,” he says in his video The venture: selling diaries online. First, you’ve got to create a book cover design on Canva, upload it onto Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon’s ebook publishing platform, and then sell it directly onto the site.

Once again, every stage of this side hustle is rushed through in his two-and-a-half minute video. In reality, the proportions of my (gorgeous) Kermit design are unusable, according to KDP. My stress levels start going through the roof as I fiddle around with its dimensions. Hours later, it works – the book is now being reviewed by Amazon. 

Anyway, it’s been three days later and I’ve still not heard back. I’m yet to see a penny from a task that took me three hours, not the 30 minutes promised. 

Ease to carry out: 5/10
Money made: £0

TikToker @digitalprofiting, the same user behind my failed Amazon diaries venture, offers me another route to financial success: an online T-shirt business. Could he be right this time? He claims that designing a shirt on Canva, uploading it onto Printify and then selling it through a third party was easy, cost-effective and a sure-fire way to earn. 

Designing the shirt was gloriously simple compared to my last side hustle. Plus: I genuinely think I’m a talented t-shirt maker, as the above image illustrates. But like any artist worth their salt, my audience fails to understand how sublime it is. My fashion piece failed to resonate with normies (no surprise there!) and I made no sales. 

Ease to carry out: 9/10
Money made: £0

By this point, I am this close to throwing my laptop off the top of my multi-storey apartment block. My final side-hustle, courtesy of a tip-off from @financiallyfreeonline, is promoting affiliate codes on my social media.

“Start this side-hustle to make $3-5k per month in your spare time,” she claims. To carry this one out you have to sign up to a platform called Clickbank, a global e-commerce platform. From there you create unique links for whichever brand you want and post it on your socials, in the hope some chump wants to part money over an unheard-of health supplement.

Clickbank must have a fun side project in torture, as they make new sign-ups like me watch an obligatory ten-minute video of its CEO going on about how the company truly cares about its users making money. Immediately afterwards, Clickbank tries to sell me a course on how to sell affiliate links for a mere $50 a month – not a great sign, but I persist nonetheless.

Fortunately, everything from here is pretty easy. The main issue is how mortifying all the products were – from betting to diet pills, it was hard to find something that didn’t feel icky to brazenly tack onto my social media. I went for an astrology chart reading, which offered one of the lowest returns at just $15 (some of the more embarrassing items could theoretically get you up to $100 per sale), and was unsurprised when the data revealed I hadn’t made a single dime. There it was, clear as ink: I’m a shit influencer. 

Ease to carry out: 8/10
Money made: £0

So, in conclusion, I can’t side hustle my way to being rich. I can’t even side hustle the equivalent of a can of Coke. I’m in the exact same position as I was before starting, except I’m even more burnt out and irritable. 

Financial glow-ups are a dime a dozen and offer us hope of emancipation from the daily stress of bills and rent. But, as I found out, you can’t side hustle your way from a shitty houseshare to a penthouse – at least, not from an Etsy digital planner business.