I Tested Four Side Hustles in One Year — Here's What Each One Actually Earned

The default narrative in side hustle content is the success story. Person tries a thing, person makes money at the thing, person now teaches others how to do the thing. The article tells you what the person did, with the implicit suggestion that if you do the same thing, you'll get the same outcome.

I want to push back on this format because it leaves out the most important piece of information: how often the same approach fails. If a method works for 1 person out of 100 who try it, the success story still gets written, and you have no way of knowing from the article whether you're the 1 or one of the 99.

In 2023, partly out of curiosity and partly because I was trying to add to my income beyond teaching, I deliberately tested four different side hustles in parallel. I gave each one a fair shot — at least three months of consistent effort — and I tracked time, money in, money out, and what I learned. Three of the four failed. One worked. I want to walk through all four with the actual numbers, because I think the comparison is more useful than any individual story.

Hustle One: Tutoring on Wyzant

The pitch was straightforward. Wyzant is a marketplace for tutors. Sign up, set your hourly rate, accept students who book you, get paid through the platform. As a teacher with eight years of experience, I assumed I'd have a real edge.

I created a profile in January, listed elementary math and reading as my subjects, and set my rate at $40 an hour. I waited.

In the first month, I got two students. Both were elementary-age kids whose parents wanted help with reading fluency. I tutored each of them once a week for an hour. After Wyzant's 25% platform fee, I cleared about $30 per session, or $240 a month.

By month three, one of those students had stopped (the family moved). The other student was still going, plus I had picked up a third — a third grader struggling with subtraction. Total: $360 a month before fees, $270 after.

By month six, I had two students consistently. Income: roughly $250 a month after fees. Time: about 8-10 hours a week including session prep.

This was, by my standards, a poor outcome. The hourly rate worked out to about $25 after platform fees, and the student count had not grown despite my best efforts to be a great tutor. The reason, I eventually realized, is that Wyzant is saturated with tutors in most subject areas, and the algorithm pushes new students toward established tutors with hundreds of completed sessions and high ratings. Breaking into the top tier is genuinely hard, and I had no realistic path to do it without making this a much larger time investment than I was willing to make.

Verdict: $1,500 across the year. Quit at the end of year one.

Hustle Two: Selling Kids' Curriculum on Teachers Pay Teachers

Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) is a marketplace where teachers sell lesson plans, worksheets, and classroom resources to other teachers. As a teacher, I had been buying things from TPT for years. I figured I might as well try selling.

I spent a weekend creating ten resources — math worksheets for second grade, a sight word bingo game, a set of behavior reward charts. I uploaded them at $3-5 each.

In the first month, I sold three things. Total revenue: $11.

By month three, I had uploaded another ten resources and was selling about $40 a month. By month six, I was at $80 a month.

The catch was the time investment. Creating a single TPT resource takes me about 4 hours from concept to upload. To grow this into meaningful income, I would need hundreds of resources, each one taking 4 hours, each one earning a few dollars a month at most. The math at scale was bad. To get to $1,000 a month I'd need maybe 200-300 active resources, which represents about 1,000 hours of work, with the income compounding only slowly.

I quit TPT at month seven. Total earned: about $380 across nine months.

Verdict: Possibly viable as a long-term passive income stream if you have a bottomless appetite for creating curriculum. Did not match my actual life or interests well enough to keep going.

Hustle Three: User Testing on UserTesting.com

UserTesting is a platform that pays you to test websites and apps. The pitch is that companies need real user feedback, and they pay $10-30 per test for someone to record themselves walking through their product and giving thoughts.

I signed up in March. After a screening test that I passed, I started getting invitations for tests roughly twice a week. Each test took 15-30 minutes including the recording.

This one had real upsides. The pay was decent — averaging $15 per 20-minute test, which is about $45 an hour. The work was interesting (or at least varied). There were no clients to manage, no marketing to do, no skill to develop.

The downside was volume. I averaged 4-6 tests a month, which worked out to $60-90 a month. The platform sends invitations based on demographic targeting — if you don't match what a study is looking for, you don't get invited. There was no way to make myself more eligible for more studies. The income was capped by what came in, not by how hard I worked.

I did this for about eight months. Total earned: $620.

Verdict: Real income, very part-time, capped by demand. Useful as a small supplemental income, not viable as a primary side hustle. I still occasionally do tests when invitations come in.

Hustle Four: Freelance Writing

The fourth hustle was freelance writing. I had been writing on my own blog for about eighteen months, and I started actively looking for paid writing assignments.

The first assignment came in May, from a financial services company that had read one of my blog posts about debt payoff. They paid $400 for an 1,800-word article. I spent about nine hours on it.

The second assignment came two months later, from the same company. Then a third. Then a fourth client found me through the same channel. By month nine I had three regular clients and a backlog of assignments I was struggling to keep up with.

By the end of year one, I had earned $4,200 from freelance writing. The hourly rate worked out to about $48 across all the work, including the time spent on marketing and client communication.

The crucial difference from the other three side hustles was that this one compounded over time. Each piece I published became a portfolio sample that helped me land the next client. Each client was a recurring relationship rather than a one-off transaction. The hours invested in year one were producing returns in year two without me having to redo the work.

Verdict: Slow start, real compounding, the only one of the four I'm still doing.

What the Comparison Showed

Let me put all four in a table for comparison.

The differences are not subtle. The fourth hustle paid roughly seven times the hourly rate of the first one, on the same total effort, and is the only one that's still active two years later.

What predicted success was not how many people online were promoting the side hustle, or how exciting it sounded, or how much "passive income" it promised. What predicted success was a single property: whether the work compounded.

The tutoring sessions did not compound. Each hour was an hour, paid once. The TPT resources compounded slowly but the per-resource economics were too poor for the compounding to add up. The UserTesting work didn't compound at all — every test was a fresh transaction.

The freelance writing compounded in two ways. The portfolio compounded — every published piece made me more attractive to future clients. The client relationships compounded — each retained client became a source of referrals and additional projects. By year two, the same hours were producing several times the income they had produced in year one.

The Pattern I Now Use

Based on this year of testing, I now use a simple test before starting any new side hustle.

Does the work compound? If I spend ten hours doing this thing today, will the result still be earning me money a year from now without me doing it again? If yes, it's worth pursuing. If no, it's a glorified part-time job and I should evaluate it as such.

This rules out almost all gig-economy work — Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, TaskRabbit, all of these are hour-for-dollar trades with no compounding. It rules out most service work that doesn't have a recurring component — one-off photography, one-off design, one-off consulting.

It includes content creation, software products, recurring service businesses, royalty-based income, and businesses where you're building an audience or a body of work that creates leverage.

The ruled-in category is harder to start, slower to pay off, and far more lucrative once it does.

What I'd Tell You

If you're considering a side hustle, do not pick the one with the most exciting marketing. Pick the one that has the property of compounding.

The compounding ones almost all share three traits: there's a body of work that accumulates over time (a portfolio, a course catalog, a set of products), there's a relationship you can grow (clients who refer you, an audience that follows you, a customer base that returns), and the marginal hour gets cheaper relative to the marginal dollar earned as the business grows.

Most side hustles do not have these traits. The ones that do are worth pursuing seriously. The ones that don't are fine for short-term income but won't produce the trajectory most people are actually hoping for when they start a side hustle.

Test multiple things if you have to. Track the numbers honestly. Quit the ones that aren't working. Lean into the one that compounds. That's the entire framework, and it's the one I wish I'd applied at the start of my year of testing instead of the end.