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

Stay At Home Hustlers

Ma, mom, mummy… In my search for the never ending side hustles for the US population, I stumbled upon a theme. Many stay at home parents are looking to add some income while they watch their kiddos.

This introduces a unique challenge because it negates a bunch of common options such as delivery, uber, and anything else that causes you to be out of the house most of the day.

So what are the best options for folks staying at home and how much could they make hustlin’ from home?

I navigated dozens of Reddit posts for the most upvoted side hustles for stay at home folks and estimated projected revenue.

These are broken down by income reportedly earned per month and a brief description of how they got started.

1. Data annotation - $350/week

With the rise of AI, come those who must assist our future overlords. That’s where data annotation comes in. This site is the most common one referenced (not an ad and have not tried it myself). Folks claim they can earn around $350/week.

2. Day care - $400/week/child

This one stresses me out just thinking about it. Need something to take your mind off your kids while making some extra cash? Watch more kids! This option can be very lucrative depending on your location and patience level.

3. Online/phone sales - $250/week

This was a pretty generic one but basically a handful of folks boasted about making around $1k/mo doing online sales (mostly in the solar category) but you can do this for loads of other opportunities.

• door knock to find whole sale deals for real estate agents (pays ~$20k/deal)

• start a cleaning “agency”, essentially booking customers, sending a cleaner and keeping the difference

  

4. Flipping goods on eBay/ Poshmark /FB marketplace - $250/week

This was by far the most common and highly ranked response. Some frequent hot tips: find a niche and master it. Some people do shoes, some people trading cards, some people antique waffle irons. This is important because it helps you narrow down what you’re looking for, you get way better at estimating how much you can earn, and you become the SME (subject matter expert) in the area who people will turn to, which generates more sales.

5. Wedding videographer - $500/wedding

This one surprised me but makes sense. Here’s why: Weddings are typically a couple of hours on a weekend. So you would need to find a sitter while your out shooting the wedding but the rest (editing) can be done from the comfort of your home. You’ll also be able to under cut some professional photographers on price while still earning a very solid wage (also there’s free drinks 🍺)

6. Laundry service - $500/week

I love hearing of new side hustles I hadn’t considered before. Many stay at home parents have huge washers and dryers because they do HUGE LOADS. You can turn your washer/dryer into a cash flowing machine. Simply promote your services and provide a bunch of common options, for example: add scents, hang dry, fold, delivery, etc. and up charge for everything.

7. Virtual Assistant - $250/week

Tell me your qualified without telling me your qualified. If you can raise a child, you can be a virtual assistant. These jobs often pay over minimum wage and can easily be done from home. Hence the “virtual” part.

8. Delivered baked goods - $350/week

I love these posts but have yet to try one out. Here’s how it works: someone posts baked goods on facebook marketplace. They cross promote it on the local neighborhood pages. Often baking huge cakes that can be bought by the slice or the whole shebang. They take amazing mouth watering pictures and if they like the grey area (like me), they offer grubhub/uber eats delivery option to generate more business.

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Family discount… Most of your first customers will be from people you know. This is a great way to hone in on your craft/product offering without worry of messing up or worse (getting a bad review).

Use this time to figure out your offering and message. What is your cost of goods and tweak the pricing to make sure your earnin and not burnin 🔥 

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

The 1% of the 1%… One of my favorite stats: if only 1% of adults in America fit your demographic, then thats still over 3 million people! If only 1% of those folks are your customers then that’s still 30,000 people. If your offering is ~$20, that’s $600,000 in revenue 🤯 

What this goes to show is that you only need to tailor your offer to a small subset of people and then go all in!

What I love about stay at home folks is they are EXTREMELY purposeful with their time. You only get so many hours (or minutes) in between naps, play dates and sports. So by default you have to be efficient with every move you make.

Viability:

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

Parental control… The takeaway is this; You have options!

These can be simply broken down into 3 categories:

1. Generating online sales

2. Creating a product

3. Completing tasks

If any of the above generally speak to you, give it a shot. Worst case scenario, you hate it, and you just go back to doing what you were doing before.

(This is not investment advice. 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 👋 

Paren