Every Side Hustle I’ve Tried (Honest Results)

I’ve tried a lot of things before landing on blogging.

Not all of them were smart. Not all of them made money. Some of them made exactly zero dollars despite weeks of effort, and one of them actually cost me money before I pulled the plug.

I’m writing this because when I was researching side hustles, I kept finding two kinds of content: either breathless “I made $10k in 30 days” stories, or vague overviews that never told me what actually happened when a real person tried these things.

This is the second kind — except honest. Here’s everything I’ve tried, what I actually did, and what the result was.

1. Online Surveys

What I tried: Swagbucks, Survey Junkie, a couple of others whose names I’ve already forgotten.

Time invested: About 2-3 weeks of regular use.

Money made: Maybe $8-12 total.

What happened: Surveys are real in the sense that they do pay you. They’re not real in the sense that the hourly rate works out to something like $1-2 per hour once you account for surveys you get disqualified from halfway through. I spent 20 minutes on one survey, got disqualified at the end, and that was the moment I accepted this wasn’t going anywhere.

Verdict: Not worth your time unless you genuinely have nothing else to do and enjoy answering questions about laundry detergent preferences.

2. Selling on eBay / Facebook Marketplace

What I tried: Listing things around the house we no longer needed. Old electronics, kids’ clothes they’d outgrown, some furniture.

Time invested: A few weekends over about two months.

Money made: Around $200-300 total.

What happened: This one actually works, which is why I’m not doing it anymore — not because it failed, but because you eventually run out of stuff to sell. Unless you’re willing to go into reselling full time (buying things cheaply and reselling them for profit), it’s a one-time clearing-out exercise, not a sustainable income stream.

Verdict: Good for a one-time cash injection. Not scalable unless you commit to reselling as a real business.

3. Dropshipping

What I tried: Set up a Shopify store, found some products on AliExpress, ran a small Facebook ad campaign.

Time invested: About 6 weeks.

Money made: $0.

Money spent: Around $80 on ads and Shopify fees.

What happened: I picked a niche that seemed good — home organization products — set up a store that looked professional enough, and ran ads targeting what I thought was the right audience. The ads got clicks. The clicks did not become purchases. I tweaked the product page, changed the targeting, tried different ad copy. Still nothing.

Looking back, I think the issue was that I was competing against established stores with better prices, faster shipping, and real customer reviews. As a brand new store with no reviews and AliExpress shipping times, I had nothing to offer that the competition didn’t do better.

Verdict: The barrier to entry is low, which means the competition is brutal. Possible to make work, but requires significant time, money for ads, and a willingness to fail repeatedly before finding something that works. Not the right fit for a dad with limited time and budget.

4. Print on Demand

What I tried: Created a Redbubble account and uploaded some designs. Nothing elaborate — simple text-based designs.

Time invested: A weekend setting it up, occasional uploads over about a month.

Money made: $0.

What happened: I uploaded maybe 15 designs and waited. Nothing sold. I didn’t do any promotion, which in hindsight was the problem — Redbubble has millions of products and without driving traffic to your store, you’re invisible.

Print on demand can work, but it seems to require either genuinely original designs (I’m not a designer) or a real marketing effort to drive people to your products (which requires another platform with an audience).

Verdict: Low risk, but also low probability of success without design skills or an existing audience. Passive income only in theory — in practice, it requires active promotion to make sales.

5. Freelance Writing

What I tried: Applied for a few content writing gigs on Upwork and a couple of job boards.

Time invested: About two weeks of applying.

Money made: $0 (never landed a gig).

What happened: The entry-level content writing market is extremely crowded and the rates are low. I applied for several positions, heard back from one, and the rate offered was $10 per 1000-word article. At my writing speed, that works out to about $5-7 per hour — and that’s assuming I could find consistent work, which wasn’t guaranteed.

Higher-paying freelance writing exists, but it typically requires a portfolio, a niche, and a track record. Starting from zero in a competitive market is a slow road.

Verdict: Possible, but building a real freelance writing income takes time to establish credibility. Better long-term play once you have a blog with published work to show.

6. Blogging (Current)

What I’m trying: This. Lazydadlife.com. Documenting the real experience of a dad trying to build income online.

Time invested: A few months, with a full reset and restart.

Money made: $0 so far.

Why I’m still doing it: Unlike the other things on this list, blogging has a compounding quality to it. Every post I write stays up and has the potential to attract readers for years. The work accumulates in a way that survey-taking and failed ad campaigns don’t.

It also costs almost nothing to run, fits into the margins of a busy schedule, and is something I can do entirely on my own without needing a customer, a client, or anyone else to cooperate.

Is it working yet? Not in terms of income. But the foundation is being built, and I’m more convinced than I’ve been about any of the other things on this list that it’s the right direction.

Verdict: Too early to call. Check back in six months.

What I’ve Learned From All of This

A few patterns I’ve noticed across everything I’ve tried:

Low barrier to entry usually means high competition. Surveys, dropshipping, print on demand — anyone can start these, which means everyone has. The easier something is to start, the harder it is to stand out.

Most side hustles require either time, money, or skills. Ideally all three. I had limited amounts of all of them. That narrowed the realistic options significantly.

Consistency matters more than the perfect strategy. I tried most things for a few weeks and moved on. That’s not enough time to know whether something works. Blogging is the first thing I’ve committed to long enough to actually find out.

“Passive income” is mostly a myth at the start. Everything requires active work upfront. The passive part, if it comes, comes later — after a lot of non-passive effort.

Next up: why I chose blogging specifically over all the other options — and the honest reasoning behind that decision.