The First 29 Side Hustles

I picked up Chris Guillebeau’s book, “100 Side Hustles.”  I’m about a quarter of the way through the book.  I was interested in how start-up cost related to revenue based on the type of side hustle. 

While reading, I created an excel spreadsheet that summarized the side hustle.  I included a title for the idea, start-up costs, revenue for each of the first three years, and a category for the side hustle.  Not all the featured side hustles included revenue for the first three years.  Some of the side hustles were only a few months old.  For seasonal side hustles, I used the seasonal revenue as the annual revenue.  For non-seasonal side hustles, I extrapolated to a year.  For those side hustles that broke down their cash flow into first, second, and third year revenue, I noticed that year 2 revenue was usually very close to year 3 revenue. 

Since I was interested in how input cost related to stable revenue, I decided to plot “Year 1 Cost” vs. “Year 2 Revenue.”  If year 2 revenue was not clearly reported, I used the annual revenue. 

I categorized the side-hustles myself according to the following categories. 

• Hand made
• Education
• Manufacturing
• Shipping
• Freelance
• Resale
• Event planning

I wrote the following python script.

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib as mpl
import seaborn as sns

df = pd.read_excel('100SideHustles.xlsx')

x = df["Y1 Cost"]
y = df["Y2 Revenue"]

ax = sns.scatterplot(df, x=x, y=y, hue = df["Category"])
plt.title("Side Hustle Performance by Category")
plt.xlabel("Start-up cost ($)")
plt.ylabel("Year 2 Revenue ($)")
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(mpl.ticker.StrMethodFormatter('{x:,.0f}'))
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mpl.ticker.StrMethodFormatter('{x:,.0f}'))

plt.savefig("SideHustles_00.png")
plt.show()
plt.clf()

For this small sample size of 29 side hustles, I made the following observations:  The two side hustles with the highest revenue were resales.  One of the two side hustles with the highest start-up cost was a resale project, and the other was a manufacturing project.  Education side hustles had the lowest start-up costs.  The handmade side hustles generated $10k to $50K per year.  Freelance services generated $20k – $100k per year.  

As I continue reading, I will update this plot.  I will be curious to see how it evolves.