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Starting With $100

Welcome to Part 3, the FINAL thread in this series in the “side hustles you can start with $100”. Today is the Online Sales portion.

As a reminder, this is the question we’re answering:

I have a $100, what side hustles can I start with this?

Here we are in this series:

• Part 1: Door to door

• Part 2: Work from home

• Part 3: Online sales (Today)

Online sales can be defined as earning money through outreach and communication online (or sometimes via phone).

Online sales typically work in 1 of 2 ways:

1. Referral fee approach - Referring a customer to a company or individual and collecting a fee

2. Middleman income approach - Finding a paying customer, taking payment, and paying someone else to do the work for less

To start, I featured an online sales side hustler, whose cleaning agency brought in $20k/mo in revenue. He took the Middleman income approach and recently sold his business.

Some of the pros and cons of each 🎭

Here’s some examples I’ve personally tried:

• Booking a person of interest to speak at conferences and universities (referral)

• Selling used gym equipment from a gym I worked at (middleman)

I’ll talk about:

1. start-up costs 🚀 

2. getting your first customer 🤝 

3. getting your next 100 customers 🙌

4. how much you can make on average 💰

Start-up Costs

Referral start-up costs are typically free 99 aka $0 (my favorite price 😏). You’ll do some cold out reach to land referral gigs, set up a contract to agree on process and payout. That’s generally it.

Middleman start-up costs will mostly be tied to ad purchasing and learning the ropes. This can all be started with less than $100.

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Niche better have my money… This type of side hustle is the most convenient but has the toughest challenge in getting your first customer. I’ll break down some examples I’ve done as well as how I’d get started in each of these categories if I were to do it again.

Here are examples I’ve personally done in each of these categories:

Referral - I met a guy that had done 26 years in prison and wrote a couple books, and is now attempting to reform the prison system. He gave talks and I reached out saying I would love to help book him for speaking gigs. I reached out to universities and other areas, landed him gigs and got a fee.

Middleman - My pool guy was looking for more work but didn’t want to interact with anymore customers. I asked what his rates were and set up a facebook page. I asked a few friends to leave good reviews on the page to get some traction and started getting some inbound customers looking for quotes. I used google maps to estimate the pool size and sent the pool guy over to the customers house. He got paid what he wanted and I kept the difference.

If I were to do this again, not much would be changed but here’s what I’d do.

Referrals

If you have some audience reach: hopefully you know what category you’re in; comedy, cleaning products, traveling, make-up, etc. Let’s do the comedy example: I would reach out to all of the comedy clubs in my state.

1. Tell them you have an audience that loves to laugh and would like to send them some business.

2. Ask them if you can get a referral code with a small discount when used.

3. Negotiate a payout for each person referred ✅ 

If you don’t have an audience: reach out to your favorite podcast or newsletter (bonus points if they aren’t huge yet).

1. Ask them how they get ads on their platform and if they are interested in having you help them get ad revenue.

2. Reach out to potential advertisers, tell them about the podcast/newsletter (and important stats)

3. Get paid for every advertiser you land on the podcast/newsletter

Middleman

What service do you use or most familiar with? Could be house cleaning, pool cleaning, yard maintenance, window cleaning, dog grooming, etc. There’s definitely one that you’ll have SOME familiarity with. Let’s go with yard work

1. Reach out to a few local ones in your neighborhood and get quotes on a yard.

2. Figure out how they do their pricing to quote customers

3. Hit up a few yard guys asking what their hourly pay rate is

4. Set up a facebook business page and ask friends to leave you a few good reviews. (can also purchase ads)

5. Reach out to your in Nextdoor and your neighborhood FB group to get free quotes on yard work.

6. Give estimates based on time and add 20%. (p.s this WILL take time to learn as you may under estimate on items and will be on the hook for the difference)

7. Send your yard guy out and keep the difference

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

Proof is in the pudding… Life becomes easier for referral folks because you can show the numbers on how your referrals are doing. Unfortunately, we can’t exactly say the same for the middleman approach. The more customers you get, the more contractors you’ll need, the more you’ll need to maintain these relationships and mitigate issues.

Being in a growing middle man biz goes as the poet B.I.G once prophecized, “Mo money, mo problems” 

If you’re in the referral game, I would:

1. reach out to similar companies like the ones that have been working

2. start to copy my process and apply it to another industry; real estate, legal, beauty products etc.

3. start doing ads and promos to create higher top of funnel volume

For the middleman game, I would:

1. Create a contractor network where I can source folks and have backups for jobs

2. Run ad campaigns to get more customers

3. Automate my quotes for faster reply times to land more customers

4. Focus on decreasing my expenses to increase my yield

How much can we make doing this?

• Referrals can depend on the price of the service or product referred, the more expensive, the higher the fee (I hear lawyers give the highest referral payouts)

• Middleman can be anywhere from negative dollars (losing money from a bad quote) to 5%-10% when starting out to 20% as you learn your business and the industry

The End Goal

Refer a friend… each of these side hustles can lead to different outcomes. You can create a decent sized referral business but would have to become a master promoter and SEO guru.

On the other hand, you are able to sell your Middleman business for substantial cash or just turn your side hustle into your main squeeze.

Fortunately these all start with less than $100, so the ultimate end goal when starting is to break even 😜 

Viability:

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

This is a little tough, getting a referral pipeline or building a middleman business is no walk in the park. You’ll have to either build your audience or build your pipeline.

Either one takes a solid amount of effort but once you get things going, referrals can be a very hands off, passive income approach and you can sell your middleman business!

(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 👋