Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your weekly Tuesday email, where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

Cash 4 College

College Cash… One of the most highly asked questions in my favorite subreddit r/sidehustle, is “I’m a college kid looking to make a few extra bucks, what should I do?”

Music to my ears as these are my favorite kinda side hustles:

1. Little investment upfront

2. (probably) low skill

3. Can operate from campus

4. Beers after your first sale 🍻 

Personally, I had a few side hustles in college: dropshipping socks, booking speaking engagements for an ex-convict, and selling items from past due payments in storage units.

So this got me thinking. What would I do as a college kid in this era to make some side cash to pay for party favors (errr books, sorry mom)?

Reselling stuff is something that kept coming up again and again. Simply broken down, this means buying something in bulk or used for cheap and selling it at a markup.

Clothes or small collectibles seem to be the best bets when it comes to reselling, so let’s get started.

So how would we go about setting this up and how much could we make in the process?

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Slangin’ stuff… Selling clothes is fairly easy these days. Sites like Poshmark, FB Marketplace, and OfferUp make it incredibly easy to snap a pic, set a price and ship stuff to someone looking to buy what you’re selling.

After pulling a few threads on this research, there’re two routes to go in this biz:

1. Being an “influencer” and selling to your base

2. Specialize in selling niche products; athletic wear, vintage clothes, etc.

So choose which ever niche you think will make you rich. Let’s do vintage stuff, that seems to be the hottest thing right now.

So here’s exactly how I would go about starting this hustle:

1. Go to the richest neighborhood you have access to and check out their Goodwill, Salvation Army, used clothing store.

2. Also check on marketplace and neighborhoods for garage/estate sales.

3. Spend max $20 on a handful of clothes. With the goal of spending at most $1-$5 per item.

   1. You can also look online to see what styles/brands have the best resale value and the most likes/comments on the item.

4. Now test out the waters and put them up for sale.

You’ll start to quickly learn about sizing, pricing, and trends.

This costs us $20 to get started and if you sell all your items between $10-$15 you’ll already be up $100!

• Square for accepting my customer payments

• Build all my sites no code on Dorik

• I write this newsletter and earn money on Beehiiv 

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe… So you got your first sucker customer, now what?

Double and triple down on the things that sell and ditch the ones that don’t. Encourage and ask customers to leave reviews on your seller account so your products bubble up to the top of search pages. (Can even incentivize reviews by adding in a small free product if they do)

Lastly, add more streams where people can buy your stuff like Whatnot. It allows you to reach a huge audience of buyers and run live auctions on products you’re selling.

Check out this guy making $130k/mo selling on Whatnot. He buys by the pallet for $.50/unit and sells via 15 second auctions.

While $130k/mo may be a wild case, building up to it in increments of $1k/mo is not.

This idea is something (as you can see) can be started with less than $100 and scaled up to earning thousands of dollars per month from the comfort of your home.

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Holy shirt… This is easy to start and scale. Most of the work will come from sourcing the clothes but once you’re able to nail that down, you can ship product to buyers without the hassle of meeting up.

This hustle is getting slightly saturated, making it slightly difficult to stand out but consistency and a great customer experience will help you grow this into a great source of revenue!

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋