9 Easy Side Hustles You Can Start This Weekend Whether you're looking to help the planet, make some money on your unused space, meet new people at exclusive events, or make money while shopping online, let these side hustles inspire you to make some extra cash.
By Frances Dodds Edited by Mark Klekas
It's no secret that life is expensive these days. We've all experienced sticker shock at the grocery store or gas station, and many of us are wondering how we're going to make ends meet — much less save for the future. But for BIZ Experiencess, a challenging situation is also an opportunity to get creative, and make some money. Life is too short to spend your extra time being bored or miserable, so we think the best side hustles are those that incorporate your interests and talents.
Related: Why Side Hustles Might Look Different in 2025. Here's What to Expect, According to an Expert.
As we kick off the new year, we are looking back on some of our favorite side hustles for inspiration. These gigs and mini businesses have helped everyone from college students and busy dads to grandparents looking to pad their retirement savings.
1. Rent out your property as a parking spot
Justin Cambra lives in Seattle, and as with many cities, there's a shortage of free and accessible parking. This is especially true if you need a longer-term spot for a couple of weeks or months. That scarcity was the impetus for Neighbor, a company that lets people rent out available spaces on their properties — basements, attics, garages, parking spots — to store personal items or vehicles.
Cambra created his account in January 2023, got his first booking in February, and started getting paid in March — since Neighbor works on a monthly payout schedule. Early on, he was making a couple hundred bucks a month, but now he says he's up to $1,000 or more a month, with 20 spots. And it only takes him 15 to 30 minutes a month to manage.
Read more about Cambra's side hustle here.
2. Pick up shifts at exclusive events and summits
Tremont Turner was working his way through college in Hammond, Indiana, making minimum wage at Chipotle and Panera and dreaming of becoming an actor. One day, a friend of his who did some work as a brand ambassador asked if he could cover for her. She was supposed to work a promotional ESPN event — a fantasy football draft — but something had come up and she couldn't make it.
Turner began picking up more and more brand ambassador jobs. He worked at music festivals — giving out samples of products like Aperol Spritz, doing line control, and creating brand "photo moments." He worked tech conventions, assisting people with downloading an app or following a brand's social media accounts. He also worked executive summits, helping powerful business leaders with networking and getting around.
Some of these events offer a daily rate — generally about $300 to $400 a day — and others are hourly, in the range of $25 to $35 an hour. There are events at all different days and times, so you can build your own schedule. This flexibility allowed Turner to start doing more background acting, and eventually, in 2017, to move to Los Angeles — where he could develop his acting career, and find even more work as a brand ambassador.
Read more about Turner's gig here.
3. If you have some unused land, rent it out to nature lovers for outdoor activities
For most farmers, it's "damn near impossible" to make a living on the land, according to Matt Graham. His family has owned a 700-acre farm in Eagleville, Missouri, since 1886, but today he describes their small cattle and crop operation as a "full-time hobby."
But Graham wanted his two sons to grow up on a farm, and he still keeps an eye out for ways to make extra money from his land. So when he heard about LandTrust, he was intrigued. LandTrust is an online marketplace that functions like an Airbnb for outdoor recreationists. It connects land owners with people looking for places to hunt, fish, birdwatch, camp and more.
LandTrust currently offers exploration of 1.25 million acres across 40 states. The average landowner makes $6,000 to $12,000 in their first year on the site, but LandTrust says its highest earners make over $60,000 a year.
Read more about Graham's experience renting out his land here.
4. Start a composting side hustle
Before 2020, Zach Cavacas was working at a residential rehab facility in Vermont, managing technicians who work with patients detoxing and trying to get sober. But when the pandemic hit, the facility had to reduce capacity, and he was let go.
After three months at home, trying to figure out his next move, he heard that Vermont was about to pass a universal food scrap ban, which is effectively a composting mandate. This meant it would soon be illegal to dispose of food scraps in the regular garbage. Cavacas says that while some municipalities pick up food scraps, most expect residents to compost themselves, or find someone to do it for them. And that's what got him thinking.
"Essentially, I did like one night's worth of research," he says. "I went out and spent every dollar my wife and I had at the time to buy a trailer and a bunch of buckets. And then I just started throwing up Facebook ads on the garage sale pages." He named his company Music Mountain Compost, and within a week, he had a couple hundred customers. He gave each residential customer a five-gallon bucket and charged them $22 a month to pick up their food scraps every two weeks. He dumps their scraps into his trailer and cleans out their buckets.
These days, Cavacas has over 600 customers, and his side hustle is now a full-time job. He estimates that he works about 45 hours a week, and is on track to make $200,000 this year.
Read more about his composting side hustle here.
5. Cruise this platform to pick up restaurant shifts when it works for your schedule
Kyle Heyliger lives in Atlanta, where his wife of twenty years and their four children are the center of his world. "It's all about finding happiness in your day-to-day and doing things that matter," he says, "and for me, it's always been the family." Over the past two decades, Heyliger has built a career as a fitness instructor, but last year, he abruptly lost a big contract that put him in a precarious position. "I took a pretty serious hit," he says. "We were anticipating a certain amount of income, so when that happened, I was kind of facing eviction."
In the past, Heyliger had moonlighted as a bartender, but he knew his roster of fitness clients and his kids' many activities would make it tough to hold down a steady bar or restaurant job. But that's when the social media gods (or the algorithm that creeped on his internet searches) served him up a FrontHouz ad on Instagram.
FrontHouz is an on-demand staffing platform, founded in 2022 by Atlanta hospitality veteran Starr Douglas. It connects venues and event companies with vetted hospitality professionals. The company does the legwork of interviewing the applicants and contacting references, and if approved, the hospitality workers can choose from gigs that match their experience. Heyliger started picking up bartending shifts on the platform over a year ago, and since then, he's brought in about $1,000 a month.
Read more about his flexible side hustle here.
6. Game the delivery apps to make the big bucks
In their late 50s, Day and Al Stefanelli found themselves in a tough financial spot. They needed to make some money — and fast. So they looked around at what they could use and saw one unairconditioned Jeep. It was not ideal in Atlanta, but it was something.
So the Stefanellis downloaded the basic driver delivery apps, and hopped behind the wheel. They started with the small stuff: food and grocery deliveries, shopping errands. "On the weekend nights, we'd pull in a hundred dollars in five hours doing all the little food ones," Day says. "Then Uber started offering some package services, like 'go to Walgreens and shop for me', or 'go to the Apple store,' and those paid better. From there, they moved onto Amazon routes, which start at $90 for a five-hour route — although, Day says, "If they get into a pinch, like the driver threw it back and you've got to be there within the hour, I've seen them raise it as high as $160."
"Eventually we noticed, hey, the bigger stuff makes bigger money," Day says. "And we saw how many people were like, well, if you could take a pallet, I would use you." So they decided to invest in a cargo van, and started driving more for Roadie, which offers bigger jobs like delivering food for a catering job, or moving a basketball hoop, or transferring trees between landscaping nurseries. "Instead of running 10 little gigs, you can run five bigger ones," Day says. They got themselves a trailer, and pretty soon the Stefanellis were averaging $500 to $750 a day — and $1,000 on their best ever day.
Read more about the Stefanellis strategies here.
7. Start a tutoring side hustle, with the assistance of ChatGPT
In 2020, Audrey Wisch was an undergraduate student at Stanford. While stuck in lockdown, she started tutoring high school students remotely as a side hustle. Pretty quickly, she became aware that the kids, as they say, were not alright. They were next-level checked out and disengaged. She'd teamed up with another Stanford student, Alec Katz, to offer more tutoring subjects (she wasn't passionate about math), and together they started experimenting with less traditional — or "transactional," as Wisch describes it — tutoring.
Instead of helping kids prep for next Friday's test, Wisch and Katz started teaching students about things they were passionate about. For Wisch, that was criminal justice, and for Katz, aviation. When the kids saw how passionate their not-so-much-older tutors were about these subjects, their excitement was contagious.
Ultimately, this discovery led Wisch and Katz to co-found Curious Cardinals: a near-to-peer, one-on-one virtual mentoring and tutoring service that connects kids of all ages with high-achieving college student mentors and tutors, and uses AI to make the experience consistent for each student. Today, Curious Cardinals has 12 full-time staffers and over 500 mentors on the platform. It's much more than a side hustle now!
Read about WIsch's journey from side hustle to building a company here.
8. Come up with a crafty item you can produce in mass
Greg Kerr developed a small clothing brand in Phoenix that specialized in literature-themed merchandise for indie bookstores. He ran that business on his own for about eight years, and then he and his wife started talking about having a baby. "Once we made that decision, I kind of flipped the switch," he says. "If we can make a little bit of extra money, even a couple hundred a month, we can put it into her college fund."
One product Kerr's company had started offering at bookstores was custom enamel pins, and Kerr had noticed sales were ticking up. "I'd wanted some kind of small item at the checkout counter that could be more of an impulse buy. At the time, I could make an enamel pin for, you know, $1.50 or $2, and they could retail for $10. They became a really hot item for us, and friends were asking for help making them. I started thinking, maybe I should offer this as a side business."
Kerr set up a website for his brand, Pin Game Strong (now Alchemy Merch), and taught himself all about enamel pins production. Kerr had figured out how to handcraft the pins, but manufacturing was very different, and he says there was a steep learning curve with developing a process and templates to keep the quality consistent. But once he was off the ground, sales went from zero to a million in 18 months.
Read more about Kerr's retail and production journey here.
9. Find a product you know a lot about (like sneakers!) and start shopping the sales
Vernon Simms' started selling sneakers all the way back in high school, when he was working at a Finish Line in the mall. He would scope out the sale wall, and then resell the best deals on eBay. Fast forward to 2015, Simms was living in Atlanta, and decided to get a pair of the Steph Curry Under Armour sneakers. "When I got them, I was like, hmm, I wonder if I could sell shoes again," he says. "And so, the next Jordan that came out was this Air Jordan Retro 12 Blue Game shoe. I bought it and listed it on eBay. When it sold I was like, okay, I'm going to do this during the week."
Pretty quickly, his operation became more sophisticated. He discovered a site called StockX, which he describes as a "stock market of things." It's an app that lets sellers list designer items like shoes and clothing, but also lets buyers make "bids" on items they're looking for — essentially "in search of" posts with a price they're willing to pay. He realized he could go on StockX while he was in the store, see what was in demand, and sell a shoe on the platform before he'd even bought it in the store.
He also started selling on Amazon, eBay, Go, StockX, Mercari, Facebook Marketplace, and he also has wholesale buyers. On StockX alone, he says he's made $4 million. In total, across all websites, about $10 million.
Read more about Simms' journey from side hustler to shoe resale BIZ Experiences here!
