How to Make Up to $800 a Month for Visiting Local Businesses You Already Love: 'It's Just Become Part of My Routine' Using this app may be the closest thing to a true "passive income" side hustle.
By Frances Dodds Edited by Mark Klekas
If you've ever searched "passive income," you were probably served up a buffet of investment strategies that require a wad of expendable cash and a hearty appetite for risk. Or maybe you ventured a few clicks down the YouTube algorithm — and unearthed "secrets" from fast-talking finance quacks on how to make a fortune while doing nothing. The tractor beam of easy money is strong, so many of us keep clicking and hoping.
That's why, when Jennifer Noble heard about Thumzup back in April, she said, "Let me look into this." Now, she's making $400 to $800 a month. "It depends how much you want to hustle it."
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Noble had recently moved from Canada to Venice Beach, California. She wanted to explore her new city, and a coworker told her about the app. It sounded like a fun way to make some extra money while — if not exactly doing nothing — going about her everyday life.
Thumzup is a fast-growing Los Angeles-based tech startup founded in 2020. The company zeroed in on the growing trend of customers trusting endorsements from everyday people over celebrities and influencers. It built an app that enables local businesses to pay customers to visit their business and post about it on their personal social media accounts, with photos and commentary. Businesses choose how much they want to pay for posts, ranging anywhere from $5 to $100 for a post, with the average landing around $10.
"It's just become part of my routine, like rating an Uber ride," Noble says. "Let's say I'm on Main Street, and I go to the restaurant JuneShine for lunch, and then the Pump Station to buy a baby gift for a friend. The app allows you to take multiple pictures at different businesses within a few blocks while running errands."
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Thumzup also incentivizes you to try businesses you may not have noticed before, and allows businesses to offer promotions on particular products or services. If you buy the promotional item, you get paid for both the visit and the specific purchase.
"For example, I needed butter and cream and I wanted a snack," Noble says, "I normally go to Ralphs grocery store, but I saw that Bay Market was on Thumzup, so I went there. Bay Market was also running a promotion on Sofrito plantain chips, so I bought those and got paid twice — which paid for everything I bought."
In this way, Thumzup is a bit like a high-tech coupon book. The cost to the user is the time it takes to look at the app, decide where to shop, take photos while you're there and write up a caption. And then, of course, there's the prospect of spamming your personal Instagram feed with endorsements of local businesses. But Thumzup only requires that a user have 50 followers, so it wouldn't take much time for someone to build up a following for an account they used specifically for endorsements. You create the post directly in the Thumzup app, so all the correct hashtags are built in for each business. The app connects to your social media account, and once the business approves your post, you're paid immediately through PayPal or Venmo.
Thumzup is currently only available in Los Angeles, but it's growing fast. This year, the company says it saw a 2000% increase in local businesses signing up, and 600% growth in users, and hopes to expand to other cities soon. "If it works in one city, it'll work in all cities," Noble says. "It makes a difference for anybody wanting to make that extra money, and it helps your local businesses. For me, it's a win-win."
